Reluctant Intimacies. Japanese eldercare in Indonesian hands
Author
Beata Świtek
Publisher
New York: Berghahn
Year of publication
2016
ISBN
978-1-78533-269-2
OPAC
Abstract
Based on seventeen months of ethnographic research among Indonesian eldercare workers in Japan and Indonesia, this book is the first ethnography to research Indonesian care workers’ relationships with the cared-for elderly, their Japanese colleagues, and their employers. Through the notion of intimacy, the book brings together sociological and anthropological scholarship on the body, migration, demographic change, and eldercare in a vivid account of societal transformation. Placed against the background of mass media representations, the Indonesian workers’ experiences serve as a basis for discussion of the role of bodily experience in shaping the image of a national “other” in Japan.