An anthropologist with a folklorist’s sensibility, Phil Stafford has written a book that is unique in the literature of gerontology. Folklorists will appreciate Stafford’s sensitivity to performance (formulaic speech and genre), artistry, and tradition, as well as the centrality of community and a shared history.
The fundamental goal of this book is to consider the ways people, particularly older people, create meaning, communitas, and purpose in the places where they dwell. His writing and thinking furthers the all-important concept in gerontology of “aging in place” (cf. Lanspery and Hyde 1997). And while this concept has received recent scrutiny and critique, it continues to be the guiding philosophy of public policy and senior housing developments. Stafford criticizes gerontologists for failing to recognize and examine further place and its meaning in the lives of older adults. He suggests that while gerontologists have understood the importance of individual reminiscence, they have failed to see the value of a shared or communal history. Stafford sets out to right these failures by delving deeper into what makes a space “place,” or in other words, a community livable.
Stafford offers an especially thoughtful look at memory as a cultural resource, personal, but perhaps more importantly, shared. He argues that it is in the shared nature of memory that sociability and meaning spring forth. Memory and place as concepts inform Stafford’s insightful critique of modern nursing homes where he boldly accuses the nursing home institution of effectively erasing memory. Individuals are displaced into unfamiliar surroundings with unfamiliar people in a perennially liminal place. He argues that place is misunderstood in senior housing settings and is used in superficial ways by simply referencing home with a few wingback chairs or a non-working fireplace. “Memory of home is not merely symbolic,” writes Stafford. “It is not semiotic but phenomenological” (90), dwelling within each of the body’s senses. Stafford’s critique does not acknowledge past efforts to redress some of the institutional and overly medicalized features of long-term care settings. Such efforts have brought about the development of assisted living as an alternative to nursing homes and more recently the growing nursing home “culture change” movement (cf. Weiner & Ronch 2003; Rahman & Schnelle 2008).
Stafford’s keen observation provides the reader with a discerning look at what constitutes a sociable exchange. He utilizes a Hymesian model to deconstruct sociability among a group of “ROMEOs” as they call themselves, Retired Old Men Eating Out, a group with which Stafford has had a long-time fieldwork relationship. He offers a valuable critique of senior living communities, where a social life is marketed as one of the community’s available amenities. Stafford argues that true sociability cannot be engineered or commodified. He writes: “The nature of sociability as an egalitarian setting means that the producers in that setting have similar productive roles,” a balance that is sadly not achieved in most senior housing settings.
This book contains some poignant insights into the experience of aging, particularly in the book’s final chapter. With an almost journalesque quality, Stafford offers a first-person view, “owning up” to the very personal nature of this topic by sharing stories and experiences from his three decades in the field. I would have liked to have heard more about his personal philosophy about aging. He writes: “More power to [the antiaging medicine movement], though I have to say, it is a losing battle. We do grow old. We die.” Aging is not about time and the body but about place, he asserts. “Aging, illness, and disability are not in the body but in the relationship between the body and its environment” (xviii), writes Stafford. We do not face aging alone but within communities. And it is in community that we take up the task of creating good places to grow old.
My only substantive critique of this book is that it may be trying to do too many things at once. I found myself wondering who the intended audience is. For example, Stafford recounts the various applied projects with which he has been involved, from a nation-wide study to determine characteristics of elder-friendly communities to community planning charettes, and Indiana University-Bloomington-based field schools and seminars. These parts of the book take on an almost how-to quality and may be more useful to community organizers and planners than to most folklorists or social gerontologists. I found these chapters in particular to break up the flow of the book, and I think they would perhaps have been better suited to a separate book. Other parts of the book are more philosophical, even literary, while one chapter is more theoretical. The one common denominator through all of this is the author himself, and so perhaps one way to look at this book is as an autobiography of a life’s work in review.
From my experience in the past several years as an ethnographer in several senior housing settings, I must take issue with Stafford’s somewhat categorical dismissal of purpose-built age-segregated housing developments. He acknowledges in his introduction that he has a “hierarchy of places” in which to age and that the new cookie-cutter housing developments are very low on his list. These fabricated and carefully engineered housing settings have earned their share of critique, I would agree. But I would have welcomed a more balanced way of characterizing these places. To his credit, Stafford acknowledges that regardless of where people live, “it is likely that elders will form community wherever they happen to find themselves” (157). I was surprised to read the currently out-of-favor phrase “old people” throughout the book, used interchangeably with more commonly used terms such as “older adults” and “elders.” It would have been less jarring and distracting to perhaps consistently use the term “elder” given the book’s title.
I am glad for the opportunity to do a thorough read of this thoughtful book. While this book may not be applicable to its varied professional and academic audiences in its entirety, it will speak to all of us who care deeply about our place in community, especially as we seek ways to age in place “in its profound sense” (173).
WORKS CITED
Lanspery, S., and Hyde, J., eds. 1997. Staying Put: Adapting the Place Instead of the People. New York: Baywood.
Rahman, A.N., and Schnelle, J.F. 2008. “The Nursing Home Culture-Change Movement: Recent Past, Present, and Future Directions for Research.” Gerontologist 48(2):142-8.
Weiner, A.S., and Ronch, J., eds. 2003. Culture Change in Long-Term Care. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Social Work Practice Press.
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[Review length: 1080 words • Review posted on September 15, 2010]