Material Memories Ethnography

Abstract

This is a study of elder women now living single in retirement and the strategies the women create to survive in this new cultural setting. Retirement-complex living in the emerging American elder care market calls for devising individual occupation strategies to adapt to the previously unknown lifeway in which the retirees form a family community matrix. Lacking cultural precedent, traditional old ways, anachronisms vanishing from the mainstream of popular culture, provide a means for the women to create and use personal bridging strategies in “living happy.” Included are scripted and solipsistic rituals that provide self-appraisal of one's health status through immediate experience. The author discovered that living out these old ways in the present has surprising health-giving outcomes because of the attendant purposeful occupation and social interactions old ways compel from elder women within this emergent household form.