British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2006

26 April 2006

Abstracts

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Dr Elisabeth Schroder-Butterfill

Social network responses to old-age crises in rural Java

Indonesia is the world’s fourth largest and most rapidly ageing population. State welfare is negligible, making reliance on kin and community networks in old age inevitable. But how effective are such networks as sources of support?

Older people’s networks differ in size, wealth, composition and density, and different intensities of past exchanges underpin them. Migration, death and enmity create gaps in people’s networks, while gift exchange and interaction may create new bonds. In any case, it is usually only a small subset of the total network which provides significant help in a crisis. I am interested in understanding what kinds of networks are most reliable and how networks adjust to changes in members’ needs. What identities may substitute for each other without forfeit in the quality or acceptability of care, and can notions of reciprocity explain support provision? To answer these questions it is necessary to follow older people over time as they move from being independent or net providers of support to being dependent on others. In this paper I focus on a specific crisis—the death of a spouse—and examine network responses to the acute demand for support this creates. This clarifies why certain elderly people are secure, whilst others are vulnerable to neglect and a miserable death.

Dr Elisabeth Schroder-Butterfill is British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at St Antony’s College and the Institute of Human Sciences, Oxford. She read Human Sciences at Oxford before taking a Masters in Demography at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and completing her doctorate on ageing in Indonesia back at Oxford. Her research on social networks and demographic change is interdisciplinary - combining demography, anthropology and development studies - and relies on longitudinal qualitative and quantitative field research in Java. She is co-editor of Ageing without Children (Oxford: Berghahn); other publications include “A framework for understanding old-age vulnerabilities” (in Ageing and Society), “Actual and de facto childlessness in old age” (in Population and Development Review), and “Gaps in the family networks of older people in three Indonesian communities” (in Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology).