Abstracts Anthropology

Growing Old in the Margins: Care, Social Abandonment, Death, and Possibility among the Elderly Poor in Lima

by Magdalena Zegarra

Grounded in twenty-four months of rigorous ethnographic fieldwork in the La Merced shelter—a decrepit facility in Lima that houses elderly adults who come from the most marginalized sectors of the city—Growing Old in the Margins: Care, Social Abandonment, Death, and Possibility among the Elderly Poor in Lima, explores the fractures, intricacies, and subtleness of everyday survival at the end of life in a context of precarious care, institutional neglect, and emotional deprivation. My work examines how these people struggle to remain worthy individuals under political economic arrangements that consider them as unproductive, poor, and, above all, as human waste and invisible selves. I argue that, at La Merced shelter, people strive to survive amid the unfathomable uncertainty in which their lives unravel.