‘We are here’: an ethnography of old age, institutional life, and the body-self in communal singing

© 2013 Pamela BruderAs residential care becomes the only option for increasing numbers of profoundly old people, it is crucial to understand the social and personal challenges of everyday life in institutional settings. This ethnographic investigation focuses on a group of ageing Jews living in an Australian residential institution who participate in a community choir. The thesis explores their intersubjective experiences of communal singing within the immediate context of bodily diminishment, institutional life, the enduring implications of traumatic experiences during the Holocaust, and the wider context of social marginalisation. The purpose of the study was to understand the embodied experiences of changes observed in the choir participants, and to examine the ways in which possibilities exist for alternative ways of being in the midst of the multiple converging factors for elderly people living in care contexts. The residential institution classifies people according to biomedically diagnosed deficits that then determine where elders will live within the home; distinct geographic units defined according to assessed ‘care’ needs. The central questions in this phenomenological study - the impact of the social and subjective experiences of the ageing body, and the effect of communal singing - were explored through methods of participant observation, in-depth interviewing and sensory and video analysis. Video clips included in the thesis extend the traditional role of visual methods from solely data collection and give voice to people with cognitive impairments. In addition, enriching the sensory dimension of the ethnography enables the reader to enter more actively and experientially into the field. This research found that the choir was an event ‘beyond singing’; a space and time where people were able to transcend the institutional system in its governance and everyday practice, and transcend their social invisibility and entrapment in bodily decline. The experience of being seen as, and becoming, a group of choristers exists in contradistinction to the everyday life in the institution. Transformative shifts in states of consciousness through heightened embodied sensory connections in the choir were found to lead to individual consonance and collective unification. This research contributes to anthropologies of ageing and the body-self. It provides a divergent perspective from dominant discourses that tend to apprehend ageing through deficit models that focus on cognitive and bodily diminishment and the pervasiveness of negative aspects of the institutional domain. Evidence arising from this study can be situated amongst comparative studies in models of care for older survivors of genocide and other deep trauma. The distinct perspective brought to gathering and interpreting data in this research was informed by the researcher’s ‘insider’ status gained through long-term employment at the site. Incorporating film into the body of the thesis circumvents the conventions of traditional ethnographic methods, giving elders with cognitive decline filmic emergence that brings them visibility, and signals the experiences of stigmatised and verbally inarticulate people as real and intrinsic to understanding alternative ways of experiencing the world and the place of communal singing in creating possibilities for transformative change