Abstract
Elder care has become a significant national conversation in Ghana due to urban and international migration, lower birth rates, family nuclearization, and longer life spans. In the rural towns of Ghana’s Eastern Region, new elder care practices and discourses are emerging. These age-inscriptions signal the agency of older persons, which is often neglected and overlooked. Discursively, older adults express curiosity about Western care facilities, a heterodox idea in relation to the orthodox position expressed by the Ghanaian government and NGOs which support kin care for older adults. Through this heterodox discourse, aged persons are able to critique the state and the church for not providing care and re-imagine a Western institution as fitting their locally constructed needs. On the other hand, pragmatically, aged persons and their children are adapting existing practices of adolescent fosterage to help provide elder care, a practice which is not discursively elaborated, and is therefore alterodox. Both age-inscriptions are less articulated than standardized discourses about the significance of adult children’s care, the orthodox position. This paper therefore illustrates how social change in norms occurs, through older people’s anxiety about their own aging, the use of their imagination, and their refashioning of existing care practices.
Highlights
Kin care is the orthodox position, in the terminology of Bourdieu (1977), meaning that it is the conventional, formulaic, and normative position. It is the only position articulated and promoted by the state and NGOs which advocate for older adults and with whom the state has written its unenacted aged policy. It coincides with local discourse, which emphasizes the morality of kin care
As Ghana goes through a demographic transition in which people are living longer and increasingly with chronic diseases, the sense of an old age crisis generates a particular narrative about aging which focuses attention on adult children’s failure to meet their caring obligations and older people’s risk of neglect and abandonment (Aboderin 2006; Apt 1996; Dsane 2013)
In her report to the Department of Finance and Economics (Apt 1991), she said that institutionalization of older adults in residential facilities should be the final alternative and that emphasis should be placed on options which support kin care and keep older adults in their households.v
Summary
In July 2014, an aged fellowship group within the Presbyterian Church of Ghana presented a play about their predicaments. In her report to the Department of Finance and Economics (Apt 1991), she said that institutionalization of older adults in residential facilities should be the final alternative and that emphasis should be placed on options which support kin care and keep older adults in their households.v. HelpAge Ghana was strongly against the establishment of old age homes, it did set up several senior day centers in the capital city Accra in 1992 and 1993 (Ayete-Nyampong 2008; Dodoo et al 1999).vi These centers provided a hot meal, activities like games, a nurse on site to conduct medical checks, and occasional excursions for participants. In the absence of a strong state policy about what to do, they are free—or perhaps forced—to imagine their own solutions to the difficulties they face
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