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A New Life for the Old: The Role of the Elderly in the Bahamas
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19758 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
4,094 Words |
| Author
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Joel Savishinsky
Joel Savishinsky is professor of anthropology at Ithaca
College. He has done research on applied anthropology in
Turkey, England, the Canadian Arctic, the Bahamas, and the
United States. He is the author of The Trail of the Hare: Life
and Stress in an Arctic Community, and the forthcoming book
The Ends of Time: Life and Work in a Nursing Home. |
Old age has sometimes been described as a foreign country, a place where we take on new identities, far removed from our former bodies and capabilities. One way to test this idea of old age as a foreign land is to look more closely at how the old live in a foreign land. By examining the lives of elderly people in other cultures, we can reassess our own society's assumptions about what is inevitable or natural in late life. That is, we can start separating what is "cultural" from what is "natural" in the human life cycle.
This kind of cross-cultural gerontology has attracted the attention of many anthropologists in recent years. They have found populations of active and long-living elderly people in areas as diverse as Soviet Georgia and highland Peru. I discovered some dramatic contrasts much closer to home when, in the late 1970s, I began to do field work in the Bahamas, an English-speaking nation of seven hundred islands whose shores lie as close as seventy-five miles from the United States. While the places best known to Americans--Nassau, Freeport, Abaco, and Eleuthera--have been transformed by tourism, the more isolated communities on the "out," or "Family" islands still retain a fairly traditional economy and social life. On Cat Island, for example, most inhabitants are the descendants of slaves freed by the British in 1834: Over a century later, they continue to support themselves through a combination of farming, goat herding, and fishing, and they still orient much of their lives around the extended family and religious values. When I settled in to live among a cluster of small villages at the south end of Cat Island, I soon realized how vital a role its elders played in the local culture.
The Missing Generation
With no industry and a subsistence base that provides little surplus, Cat Island's economy has seen a few periods of boom and bust over the centuries. Initially home to the native Arawak Indians and then to pirates, the island's first major European settlements were not established until the late 1700s. These centered on large cotton plantations and associated port facilities. Cat Island's estates, worked by African slave labor, were owned by wealthy English families, or by American Loyalists who had fled the United States after the Revolution. The plantation economy received a second wave of American émigrés when Southerners moved to the Bahamas after the Civil War in an attempt to reestablish some semblance of their antebellum lifestyle.
The cotton plantations, however, were only a modest success, and
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