Society for Medical Anthropology

Volunteered - Oral Presentation Session

Marching along together: Moral practices and aesthetics of care among later life Canadian veterans

Care, Phenomenology, Identity

Presenter(s)

• MG

  Megan Graham

  PhD Candidate
  Carleton University

As the global population ages, different communities are experiencing growing older in local ways. People live longer and care needs increase. Institutional care becomes a significant actor in the response to, and shaping of, later life experience. One of the communities growing older together in an institutional care setting is the cohort of Canadian WWII and Korean War veterans. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork with these veterans living in a long-term care facility, this paper will examine the moral practices and aesthetics of care that contextualize and inform their later life subjectivity and social relationships. Using a phenomenological lens, it will explore how music-making constructs the later life veteran body and reproduces a generational veteran identity in the form of an embodied collective musical consciousness.