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At the Centre for Excellence in Research in Ageing and Care (CoE) we have an incredible team of diverse researchers from an array of different disciplinary backgrounds. Such diversity has been instrumental in provoking debate concerning our different disciplines approaches to ageing and care. In August, I was fortunate to attend the CoE’s summer school at Waltikka in Valkeakoski where I was asked – more-or-less – to demonstrate how “classic ethnography” can be used in ageing research. The question took me somewhat aback; I had come prepared to discuss an article I had written on retirement, not the role or responsibility of ethnography. Nevertheless, I attempted to address the thought-provoking query, noting how ethnography can expose taken-for-granted assumptions about ageing. I referred to my own research, which illustrates that retirement can in some contexts – particularly for migrants – enhance their political agency, rather than diminish it (more on this at the end). However, as I reflected the on the query after the summer school, I felt I had answered the question inadequately. As an anthropologist, I wanted to use this blog post as a space to explore the importance of ethnographic research for research on ageing. 

Before proceeding, it is important to clarify what ethnography is, as I find it is often assumed by non-anthropologists to be simply a form of methodology. Ethnographic research is not a method, an ethnography is a form of holistic inquiry that relies on a range of methods, or it can be a finished piece such as a text, film, poetry, artwork, game etc., that describes a people, culture, or social phenomenon. Ethnographers are often required to not impose our own personal beliefs and feelings upon another people or social phenomena during research. This approach to cultural relativism helps not only build trust with informants, but ultimately informs the methods used in creating an ethnography. The methods used vary depending on the ethnographer and the topic, ranging from but not limited to participant observation, unstructured interviews, archival research, film, photography, and other experimental methods such as having informants paint or draw their feelings (see, Alexander 2020). 

Despite the diversity of methods, it is participant observation that often makes up the main methodology employed by ethnographers. Participant observation involves settling in or participating with a people being studied and documenting daily practices, relations, social interactions, and trying to understand these from the perspective of those being studied. This involves cultivating a lot of trust with people, getting to know them, and building long lasting friendships beyond the confines of research. Participant observation is essential for capturing the actual practices of our research informants. Many social scientists rely solely on interviews, and while this may serve a purpose in research where access is difficult, the lack of observed actual practice it may result in an incomplete picture or understanding of a social phenomenon. Instead, I argue, we should embrace research methods that are long-term and engagement with our research participants’ lives. 

It is precisely this ability to spend extended periods of time with our research participants that makes ethnography so effective for research on ageing and the life course. In ethnographic research, it is often expected for a PhD student to spend twelve months in a field site. Oftentimes these field sites become very important to an ethnographer, sometimes for their career, but more importantly for the close relations they create with the people or places they research in. As a result, many ethnographers will spend most of their time doing fieldwork or research with a select people or place, developing intimate bonds over a lifetime. For the anthropologist Susan Rasmussen (1997), it is this ability to spend extended periods of time with her informants among the Turag of northern Niger that enabled her to observe and be participant to Turag cultural norms regarding ageing. However, she found that some Turag had to find alternative ways of letting her engage with certain age-appropriate spaces and practices. This was a consequence of Turag cultural perceptions of adulthood, as she was not considered an adult at the time of fieldwork due to not having children of her own (ibid). Her work illustrates how we are not passive observers, but actively participants in the lives and cultural practice of our interlocutors, which in turn shapes our positionality. In effect, long term fieldwork is essential in understanding different cultural understandings of the life course, but we as ethnographers can at times be subject to them. 

Ethnography has many applications for ageing research, such as the ability to expose and contradict universal claims that are often found in discourses concerning ageing. Successful or healthy ageing are two such universal normative models in use today among global health professionals. “Successful ageing” is a model of individual self-reliance and healthy, productive ageing, prevailing in many neoliberal societies that promote self-governance and minimized public or welfare support. Furthermore, “healthy ageing”, as proposed by the World Health Organization, seeks to create age-friendly environments and long-term care for longer healthier lives, as if this was universally desirable. Anthropologist Sarah Lamb (2014) rightfully notes how such concepts of ageing are particular to North American or European normative or cultural ideals. Lamb demonstrates how in parts of India the there is an acceptance of decline and frailty, which is considered is perceived as part of the transient cycle of existence (ibid). In Lamb’s work, she stresses how late life does not conform to the universal and normative idea of ageing with autonomy as inherently positive but is more concerned with residing intimately with kin and loved ones (ibid). From this perspective, ethnographers expose how such universal notions of ageing fail to capture the diversity of ageing globally and the powerful narratives that seek to enforce dangerous narratives. 

When we think about research on ageing, we are often confronted with broad demographics of ageing populations in the so-called global north and the problematically phrased “booms” and “bombs” in youth populations in the “global south”. Such demographics often make for fearful news article headlines in an attempt to stir panic among pundits and politicians that eventually feed into policy that impact our everyday lives. For example, demographics about Africa’s population tend to fixate on African birth rates and the problematically phrased “African youth bomb”. Jade Sasser (2018), a feminist ethnographer of reproductive politics, demonstrates how such growing populations are entrenched in environmental population control that have roots in colonial forms of governance and racist narratives about promiscuity. In her book On Infertile Ground, Sasser (2018) illustrates with her ethnographic research with climate activists, politicians, and scientists, how population growth is framed as a part of the climate crisis. This reproduces racist crisis narratives of population growth as the primary cause of climate change, while wilfully ignoring the gross inequalities of capitalism that spearhead climate change. Instead on relaying solely on top-down demographic information, we need a diversity of research approaches to better understand and make policy for demographic changes across different contexts. As the anthropologist Laura Burke (2022) argues, we need ethnography to understand “how people count themselves”, rather than relying on an outsider’s perspective. 

Ageing research needs different methodological approaches to face the many different demographic directions and changes happening across the world. I believe ethnography has a major role in this, particularly for its appreciation for cultural context and approach to long-term research. I have been fortunate to have been funded by the CoE to continue my research with South Sudanese and other African diaspora communities in Kenya, Canada, and Finland. I am deeply indebted to my many research informants that welcomed me into their lives. In Finland, I had the good fortune to meet and befriend one individual undergoing retirement. It is through my fieldwork with him that I was able to understand how retirement was an empowering process, helping him access full citizenship. It demonstrates how process of official retirement can have unintended consequences, utilized for a range of purposes beyond simply receiving a pension. In October 2024, I will again be continuing my research, but this time in Edmonton, Canada, with a close friend and research informant who resettled to Canada in 2021 from Kakuma Refugee Camp, in Kenya. It is exciting to continue research with him, as it allows for engaging again in his daily life and reflect with him about his life course and trajectory. Spending time and doing things together help understanding perceptions on life and ageing that cannot be captured by demographics and limited interview settings.

Cited literature:

Alexander, C. J. L. (2020). The public and private politics of care: an ethnography of young carers, family life and policy presence. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

Burke, L. (2022). Making Kin and Population: Counting Life in the Wake of Abandonment in Timor-Leste. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 23(4–5), 311–329. 

Lamb, S. (2014). Permanent personhood or meaningful decline? Toward a critical anthropology of successful aging. Journal of aging studies, 29, 41-52.

Rasmussen, S (1997). Poetics and Politics of Tuareg Aging: Life Course and Personal Destiny in Niger. Northern Illinois University Press.

Sasser, J. S. (2018). On infertile ground: population control and women's rights in the era of climate change. In On Infertile Ground. New York University Press.