Aging & Society: Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

A great number of African migrants live far away from their aging relatives. Building on two long-term ethnographic studies on aging, health, and care of older Tanzanians in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, Tanzania, as well as on the involvement of their relatives in the USA and Oman, this paper shows that despite the spatial separation, care circulates between the different contexts. Over distance, migrants cannot provide technical or practical aspects of care as for example cooking, cleaning, or washing clothes for an older person or accompanying him or her to the church, hospital, or market. In contexts were “being there” becomes impossible, online forms of care are used to maintain relationships and to “care about” an older person. Technologies that facilitate communication transnationally become important to show concern and care about the older person. Furthermore, ideas about how to age well travel between different cultural contexts. This paper therefore argues that through online forms of care, Tanzanians abroad maintain a sense of presence within their social network, while the older people in Tanzania become involved in a transnational aging context. Hence, for both the Tanzanian migrant as well as the older person, online care and transnational aging practices allow a feeling of being there while being away.