It Takes Another Kind of Village: How Older Husbands in Rural Spanish Communities Experience Caregiving

Abstract

This article explores how older husbands’ caregiving experiences are interwoven with the social representation of ‘the village,’ understood herein as an intimate, local community that actively contributes to long-term care on a daily basis. The concepts of belonging and doing kinship form the analytical basis for illuminating this interaction between care from husbands and daily community care. I use the social representation of the imagined community both as the axis for articulating the singular experiences of care, and the construct of a village that values its collective history, local rituals, natural environment, and ordinary routines. Study data are based on ethnographic observations of the daily long-term care trajectories of five married couples in two villages and one small town in the rural Spanish Mediterranean.