Philip Y. Kao PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

analogy might help here: it is like giving someone young a pair of shoes slightly too big,
with the expectation that they will grow into them as they age. If the future is bleak and
characterized as one of loss, then the CCRC strives to function as an insurance policy to
cushion the fall, so to speak. This causes, however, a nervous anxiety and an even more
paranoid stance towards the life course and ageing. The ultimate fear is not death but
rather the consequences of impending disability. Independence is being able to take
care of oneself. Meanwhile, the social clock of work, retirement and leisure lose their
foothold in the CCRC. Thus, one can view the CCRC as a kind of cultural design. In an
edited book on ageing, entitled Anthropology and the Riddle of the Sphinx: Paradoxes of
Change in the life Course, Ladislav Holy reveals how the Berti of Sudan seek out various
strategies to secure support in old age. The Berti influence marriage strategies, and
allocate property to children upon their marriage. By doing so, not only do they aim to
secure the labour of their grandchildren but they are also securing a place for
themselves to age. Holy states, “It is [the Berti’s] perception of their own position in the
future rather than their contemporary interest that motivates the cultural engineering
in which they are involved. It thus need not necessarily be old age as such but the vision
of old age that can be usefully seen as enforcing specific cultural practices” (Holy 1990 ,
180). In this light, the CCRC is just that, a systemised delivery of care as a way of
negotiating an uncertain and oftentimes unpleasant future. Care is not only palliative,
but also in its most ideal form preventive. Holy goes on to state, “People do not simply
behave in a certain way because they have reached a certain stage their life course. They
envisage the future stages in their life course on the basis of the experience of those
preceding them and plan for their own future on the basis of this experience when they
are in the position to do so” (Holy 1990, 181).
What the CCRC puts into relief beyond its own temporal structuring is just how life is
experienced by those who are its residents. Haim Hazan points to the near impossibility
of ascertaining the “existential nature of [ageing’s] experienced meaning” (Hazan 1990,
190). He states eloquently that, “Unlike other liminal phases where social marginality is
furnished and reconstructed by the surrounding society, the ambiguities of ageing
constitute a normative vacuum which acquires meaning only through the behavior
adopted by its incumbents—the aged” (Hazan 1990, 183). The elderly, for Hazan as for
many anthropologists who study ageing in the context of nursing homes, are trapped in
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