Keywords

Introduction: Ageing and FPE

What can making miso tell us about wellbeing in later life? How can caring for the environment coincide with caring for/with older generations? How can we take the multiplicity of ageing experiences seriously? We explore these questions in this chapter through a dialogue on our fieldwork experiences in Japan and Uruguay, during which we both investigated the intersection of ageing and environment. We bring to this discussion the insights of feminist political ecology (FPE) on intersectionality, socionatural relations and everyday practices in order to tease out the complexities of ageing experiences and to help better understand later life.

Our starting point is that old age is not a state at which we one day arrive, in the way that retirement age is reached. You do not one day wake up old.Footnote 1 Rather, it is an inherently fluid and ambiguous process that takes place across the life course. Getting old is not easily mapped onto chronological age; as Rosario Aguirre Cuns and Sol Scavino Solari argue, “being old appears as a homogenised event due to the feature of having lived many years, to the decrease in ability (biophysical) and to the proximity to death. This centrality of chronological age in the representation of old age is naturalised in common sense and obscures the inequalities, differences and specificities of the social production of these groups” (Aguirre Cuns & Scavino Solari, 2018, p. 22). Instead, we examine the nuances in different embodiments of ageing as a way to look at counter-hegemonic responses to ideas of ageing that take place throughout one’s life.

Ageing and aged experiences are relationally materialised in different places, spaces, and environments in everyday practices (Katz, 2018). How, where, with whom and with what we age is shaped by race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, place and other important dimensions of difference. This is where, as authors, we are conscious of the difficulty to speak across contexts as socially and culturally diverse as Uruguay and Japan. We are aware that the meanings and experiences of ageing are shifting and diverse. It may be more accurate to speak of ageing in the plural, as highlighted in the title of Aguirre Cuns and Scavino Solari’s “Vejeces de las mujeres”, meaning “The old ages of women” in Spanish.

To add to the complexity, ageing experiences are not only contextual but also influenced by normative ideas about ageing that have become dominant globally. Discourses of successful ageing, active ageing and healthy ageing circulate at policy and public health levels (World Health Organisation, 2002, 2020). These discourses reinforce ideas of homogeneity in later life, masking the intersection of social differences and inequalities (Katz & Calasanti, 2015; Sandberg, 2015).

Japan and Uruguay, while contextually diverse, are also subject to the dominant norms of ageing. One commonality is that these normative discourses set up clear binaries between what is desirable, good or healthy ageing and what is not. In neoliberal contexts, with the emphasis on the individual, ideas of successful ageing can be used to justify the retrenchment of social and health services in the name of older people’s autonomy (Dillaway & Byrnes, 2009). The focus on individuals leads not only to homogenising of ageing experiences, but responsibility for “success” or “failure” in ageing is placed on individual older people. A focus on individualism leaves structural and contextual factors to the side, reinforcing the reliance on autonomy and the binaries of abled and disabled (Rice et al., 2017; Sandberg & Marshall, 2017). In our dialogue, we aim to blur these binaries and highlight the co-construction of those policies and enacted powers that drive ageing people’s agency in everyday life.

In order to go beyond ageing norms while remaining aware of context and agency, we look at two examples of collectives which focus on old age. The first is the Suisha in Japan, a rural women’s traditional food business, and the second is Uruguay’s national network for older people, REDAM (Red Nacional de Personas Mayores). We look at ageing in these specific contexts in order to illustrate the dynamics of social, political, and ecological relations. Our empirical studies look at situated ageing experiences to help diversify the understandings of ageing and later life and to broaden ageing and environment debates as part of the contours of FPE sketched in this book.

To our studies on ageing, we bring FPE understandings of everyday practices and ethics of care. We trace the complexity of ageing people’s relations, including social and cultural constructions of ageing and intersectional thinking. We question existing power discourses around ageing by attending to different ways of encountering and caring for others in everyday practices. Applying FPE concepts such as socionature (Nightingale, 2017), which speaks to the mutually constitutive quality of the social and the natural, we look at the role of the environment in experiences of ageing. We take up the FPE approach to understanding the environment as more than the experience of nature in the rural and urban contexts, instead understanding the environment as a relationally constructed dynamic process where ageing and aged experiences shape everyday life as ageing bodies intersect with machines, fungus, politics and climate in specific processes and contexts. Our focus is on the points of convergence where everyday life is maintained, continued, and repaired—that is, everyday caring practices (Tronto, 1993).

Following this explanation of ageing and old age, we briefly explain our different theoretical interests before presenting our two cases. Nanako shares stories about Suisha in Japan and Constance about REDAM in Uruguay. We then discuss FPE, ageing and generational approaches before proposing ideas for an FPE research agenda on ageing.

Theoretical Approaches

Inspired by FPE’s intersectional thinking, our case studies look at different struggles that older people engage in and how their responses go beyond the hegemonic framing of ageing. We bring our two cases into dialogue as we explore what we can learn across these different contexts. Although we both draw on experiences from our PhD research, inspired by and in dialogue with FPE thinking, our PhD projects have different theoretical moorings, which we now briefly introduce.

Nanako looks at challenges in a rural Japan women’s local business as a part of their everyday practices, whereas Constance examines in Uruguay the struggles for ageing concerns to be taken seriously within sustainability discourses. Nanako applies post-capitalist thinking (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013) to the Japanese case to see interdependencies of humans and non-humans (Sato & Alarcón, 2019; Nelson, 2017; Nightingale, 2013) ageing together in everyday practices as a result of hybrid choices of profit and non-profit making activities. In the context of Uruguay, Constance draws on rupturist gerontology, a stream of ageing thinking that speaks to the need to break with hegemonic understandings of ageing in order to deeply see and understand the everyday experiences and agency of older people (Piña Morán & Gómez Urrutia, 2019). These theoretical understandings allow Constance to explore the different temporalities (Rhee 2020; Vasquez, 2020) at play within the Uruguayan case, as well as connect specific ageing and sustainability struggles to broader conversations about socionatures (Nightingale, 2018; Singh, 2017). We use these differently theorised positions to put older people into the conversations on situated, everyday experiences circulating in FPE research and practice.

Stories of Ageing

In the two narratives that follow, we each engage with the other’s research. The dialogue we present here is based on a series of semi-structured interviews and the exchanges in a public presentation of our work in the Feminist Political Ecology Dialogues on Rethinking Age, Generation and Population.

Nanako: Japan, Kunma Suisha no Sato (Suisha)

The village of Water Wheel (Kunma Suisha no Sato) is a local women’s business group in the semi-mountainous Kuma region in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. For more than thirty years, Suisha has been producing hand-made food products and selling them at a roadside shop and restaurant that they run, where local people can also sell agricultural products. The original entities of Suisha’s food business were local women’s collectives, supported by diverse management bodies with different objectives, that commonly aimed at improving different ways of food preparation, farming, and other everyday practices through collective learning. Like many other rural women’s local businesses formed in the 1980s in Japan, Suisha was supported by the local and national governments in response to rising voices for gender equality and the urgent need to react to the challenging situations in ageing and depopulating rural communities. Since its establishment in 1987, Suisha has been contributing to community development and revitalisation, for which the state government granted it an award in 1989.

One of the guiding questions for my research is what kind of interdependent relationships are found in the attempts made towards community development by local businesses. Growing up in the capital city of my home region, I am intrigued by the everyday practices in rural communities which may be overlooked by mainstream political discourses on rural revitalisation, practices such as artesian soba noodle and miso making. Because of Suisha’s business, many people from urban areas have visited this rural community, invigorating the local economy and enhancing livelihoods. Despite Suisha’s efforts for rural revitalisation, the situation confronted by the community is still challenging as ageing and depopulation continue. Suisha’s efforts and practices stirred up my interests: how do Suisha members embrace the situation with lingering challenges, while maintaining their businesses? Who are they, emerging from the fragmented pieces of everyday practices? In order to explore these questions, I undertook ethnographic fieldwork for two three-month periods in late 2019 and in 2021–2022 to explore the interdependencies built through different post-capitalist practices embodied by ageing rural women.

Suisha’s central product is miso, fermented soybeans. Although mass-produced miso is available at supermarkets, Suisha miso is hand-made as it would have been decades ago, by each household for self-consumption. Miso production begins with making fermented malted rice and moves to cooking soybeans and mixing them with the malted rice. These processes usually take six days for one batch, with multiple batches in process at the same time. The fresh miso then goes through the fermentation process for about a year or two. The most care-intensive process is at the beginning, when steamed rice and a fungus (Aspergillus oryzae) are mixed and made into kôji, the fermented malted rice. In the process, temperature control is crucial in managing the speed of fermentation. In Suisha’s kôji manufacturing facility, the temperature is set at 35–40 °C depending on the fermentation process, and inside and outside temperatures. If successful, hyphal fungal networks form, developing root- or branch-like filamentous fungal mycelium. It is possible to discern nurtured kôji from its appearance, frequently described as “kôji blossoms are blooming”.

However, producing blooming kôji at Suisha is not an easy process. Their old-fashioned and aged equipment does not function properly to warm up the fermentation room, so Suisha members cannot only rely on the machinery temperature control. To supplement this defect, Suisha members check constantly and see if kôji malt grows well. If not, they discuss whether they should change warm water for humidifying the fermentation room, or adjust the temperature settings, in the absence of reliable working technology. These decisions for fine adjustments are made collectively, based on their experiences. The experienced sensory notion was referred to as “Kan (感/勘) puter” jokingly by the current leader of Suisha, not a computer but kan, which means both feeling and intuition in Japanese. She implied that their affective care is much more useful for the ageing process of kôji fermentation than inputs from the machine. It also signifies that the material relationship between the Suisha members with kôji is tied to other relationships with the aged apparatus. These relationships show that there is not only one way of caring. Instead, caring relationships emerge from contingency in which kôji, the machine, and Suisha members are maintaining everyday practices in fluid and ambiguous ageing processes. Experiencing these ageing processes becomes part of socionatural relations. Socionatures experienced through ageing bodies sharpen the sensibility of caring for others, making up for the shortcomings of supposedly predictable, rational measures usually provided by mechanised processes. The Suisha leader also illustrated her own ageing in relation to the materiality of the aged facility; “We, humans, get old. No wonder machines get old too”. Different ageing bodies of humans and non-humans navigate and negotiate how to make decisions about care for kôji, showing that the processes of ageing influence how we maintain, continue, and repair in everyday life (Tronto, 1993). Togetherness in the different experiences of ageing is relationally embodied through interactions with other humans and non-humans (other members of Suisha, the kôji, the manufacturing equipment) that are ageing and surviving together.

Kôji is a hand-made product for Suisha miso. Suisha members pinch steamed rice using their thumb and ring finger to check the appropriate softness. Once it is ready, the fungus powder is added to the rice. Suisha members waste no time and start massaging the rice and the fungus powder together to make scratches on the surface of the rice grains and let the mycelium stretch around the network. The steamed rice is extremely hot at the beginning: when I joined in the activity, I needed to use a wooden rice scoop, whereas the skilled Suisha members quickly switched to using their hands to massage the rice. Meanwhile, the rice and kôji mixture cooled down to human body temperature. The relationship between Suisha members and kôji is an intimate socionature: “Your hands are getting smooth, aren’t they? That’s our beauty secret”, a Suisha member told me while I had trouble scrambling the rice and kôji mixture. Due to several natural components of kôji, such as Glucocerebroside and amino acid, the cosmetic industry has researched its effects on skin regeneration or healing to harness this “beauty secret”. For Suisha members, taking care of kôji is not only a process of producing food products, but also human and non-human interactions through affectionate touching, intuiting how kôji are blooming because of their care. In turn, the kôji care for aged human bodies. The ageing experiences of Suisha members are materialised in everyday practices based on ethics, through affective interactions with other humans and with non-humans (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1
A photograph of a rectangular container full of rice with the hands of 2 people. They hold and massage the rice.

Kôji making—massaging rice and kôji malt

Full size image

Rural revitalization is an objective of Suisha’s umbrella organisation, a non-profit organisation (NPO) Yumemirai-Kunma. The NPO showcases their economic activities through running a roadside shop and restaurant, selling their products to stimulate the local economy. The NPO was established in 2000 to take over the leading role of the communal committee, the main group spearheading the communal revitalization project. Hoping to contribute to rural revitalization in ageing and depopulating communities, Suisha members transformed their business model, taking over management and supervision duties. Instead of choosing a capitalist enterprise, they adopted the form of NPO to be able to use the profit obtained through their food business for non-profit activities and the community. Unlike mass production companies, Suisha's products, such as the miso based on hand-made kôji, gain added value by using traditional production methods that require more time and effort. Challenges and intimate human and non-human relationships that appear in the production processes rarely come to the fore in their rural revitalization story, even though vital responses made through encounters with others manifest behind the scenes. These activities do not directly lead to profit making, but produce other important values by maintaining traditional food practices and caring for ageing communities, which enrich their business profile.

The hybrid approach of profit- and non-profit making exemplifies attempts to enhance interdependent relations with others. As an NPO, Suisha’s food business engages with various other community members by organising seasonal festivals and touristic events. Most of the events showcase the nature-rich environment around the roadside station, attracting urban visitors. By doing so, NPO members expected to attract more people, potential customers of Suisha, to visit the communities and the station. Suisha’s business as an NPO attempts to contribute to local economies and reinvigorate the languishing local atmosphere by encouraging increased communication among/between the locals and visitors.

Despite the attempts made by Suisha and the NPO towards economic revitalization through high-value food business, the situation remains challenging in ageing and depopulating rural communities. Still, what drives Suisha is rural women’s ethics in attending to the ageing rural communities. Encountering others through business practices bridges different ways and bodies of ageing. The ethics speak to what they need to do; that is, the ethics of care emanate from the situated ageing rural women’s perspective.

Ageing also evokes uneasy feelings about what the communities will look like in the future, a shared notion among the local people. This uneasiness motivates the entrepreneurship of the rural women, who aim to make economic relationships with others visiting from outside of the communities. The prolonged languishing local condition also drives women in Suisha to attend to the relationships within the communities. One member noted that they cannot carry on their community-based business without their communities. “I want to live in Kuma forever, and I think we want to keep living here even if one of us [husband or herself] is left alone. In the end, however, there might be no way to live here. But I want to set up a condition that we can live continuously”. She joined the NPO as a member of staff in 2001 after she retired from her career as a kindergarten teacher. She is currently in charge of the lunchbox service for single elderly people and food trucks, one of NPO’s non-profit-making activities. “I think newly joining members need to know the origin of Suisha”, meaning how members from different women’s groups orchestrated different initiatives together with the local governments, men and other women members in the communities, and visitors, with the shared commitment of revitalising these communities. She continued, “that is, to know why current Kuma is not deprived of a lively atmosphere as people are always visiting”. A monthly gathering focusing on old people is one of her committed tasks. The objective of this gathering is to set up a social space focusing on old people, though not exclusively. She designs the programme for the monthly meeting at five different locations in the communities. In the first half of the programme, there are guest speakers or lecturers, such as a local police officer, public nurse, social worker and elderly care worker. The topics are varied among different speakers’ professions who share a common thread of improving the quality of living for elderly people. The second half of the programme is more recreational, such as playing games, handicraft making or drawing. Overall, the space is interactive and full of lively talks between participants, NPO/Suisha members, and guests at each gathering. The participants also take simple health check-ups during the programme. Frequently, many of these check-ups show worrying results because the excitement of meeting each other raises their blood pressure. One participant mentioned that the importance of this gathering is the pre-planned meeting and time to gather with others, apart from the context of house visits in which community members usually meet.

Originally, the women who gathered from the different local women’s collectives to start the food business collaboratively suggested the idea of a monthly gathering for the retired members. While doing activities such as fermentation, food processing, and farming at Suisha, the members started talking about their future. Indeed, Suisha members were happy about what they had made and accomplished, not only economic opportunities but also space for themselves and social companionship with others. However, this convivial environment is not ensured in the future when many members reach retirement age. With this notion, Suisha embarked on the plan of setting up space for themselves in the future, which became a space for Suisha members as well as other people in the communities, who are sharing the process of ageing.

Suisha’s business practices take an approach that is based on hopeful and ambitious ethics that keep them in the business market while also caring for non-monetary benefits (Iwasaki & Miyaki, 2001). Their approach entails diverse ways of connecting with others and building interdependent relationships to improve everyday life, encompassing more than monetary benefits gained from the market. Suisha members attempt to sustain the ethical needs of “surviving well together”, the central quality of what J. K. Gibson-Graham et al. (2013) call a community economy. In ageing and depopulating rural communities, they attended to the critical concerns of how to sustain a community. They did so by tapping into their situated knowledge of gendered everyday practices for their food business. They embodied economic practices with expanding caring relationships by blurring the binaries of capitalist and non-capitalist relations, men and women, and the boundaries of community membership. Moreover, along with the objectives as a business entity, they envisaged themselves as ageing entrepreneurial actors making nodes of connection with others, devising other forms and practices of surviving well together.

Constance: Uruguay, Red Nacional de Personas Mayores (REDAM)

In 2019, I was six months into my PhD, still working on settling into my topic and carving out a focus for myself at the intersection of ageing and environment, when I went to Uruguay on secondment. Soon after my arrival, I was introduced to the director of Uruguay’s National Institute for the Elderly. Having shared with her my research interests, she suggested I attend the next meeting of REDAM, Uruguay’s umbrella civil society space that brings together diverse organisations that work for/with/among older people.

Feeling timid with my out-of-practice Spanish, I was immediately welcomed. Curious about what a young foreigner was doing at a meeting of elderly Uruguayans, several members introduced themselves. I met a member of the local pensioners’ association, recently retired and looking to stay politically active; the coordinator of a seniors’ sports club; a nurse working in a care home; and a lifelong activist whose current focus was advocating for the full participation of older people in society. Though they each had different motivations for participating in REDAM, they were all invested in REDAM’s objective to increase the political and social participation of older people in Uruguay.

It was my good fortune that this meeting happened to be the presentation of the network’s working paper on “Key measures on ageing for the implementation and monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” (REDAM, 2019, p. 1). This seven-page document presented a clear critique of the SDGs as they currently stand, asking why the SDGs do not “address, either explicitly or implicitly, the rights of older people” (REDAM, 2019, p. 1). In the document, they go on to identify ways in which the network calls for further work to be done on ageing and environmental sustainability. I was still figuring out what FPE meant for me and for my work, and here I had come across feminist political ecology in practice.

I was invited to visit some of the member organisations that populate the network and dove deeper into the questions raised in their working paper. Over many cups of hot beverages, I learned more about the network’s work to have older people taken seriously as subjects of rights in Uruguay. Despite the challenge of holding space for the diversity of interests present within the network, the REDAM has become a focal point for advancing the human rights of older people within Uruguay and across the region. REDAM members participated in the regional process that culminated in the Organization of American States’ (OAS) Inter-American Convention on the Protection of the Human Rights of Older Persons (OAS, 2015). The network’s members mobilised their wealth of knowledge about both domestic and international advocacy for the convention. Their important contributions to the process were recognised by other member states’ civil society organisations for having been key to the signing and ratification of the convention (González Ballesteros et al., 2018). The REDAM’s members have been able to draw on their everyday experiences of confronting ageism and imagining more full ways for older people to participate in society in order to navigate different local and international scales. Having gained a powerful international tool in the form of the OAS Convention, the REDAM’s membership has also worked to bring these discourses back into their day-to-day through dissemination activities and by showing how the Convention can be utilised (Restaño, 2019), such as the above-mentioned critique of the SDGs.

I am especially grateful for the time I was able to spend with Luisa,Footnote 2 a lifelong activist who had worked alongside a handful of other REDAM members in the drafting of this critique of the SDGs from an ageing perspective. As a member of the network who has actively engaged with mobilising attention around the importance of participation of older people, she carried with her much of the institutional memory of the REDAM.

In recounting some of our conversations, I highlight the insights Luisa shared with me. When asked why they came to focus on the Sustainable Development Goals, she shared that she felt a responsibility to contribute to a world that could be a little more gentle than when she arrived in it. Luisa was also quick to point out the forgetfulness of younger generations. She underscored the irony in some of the sustainability discourse, that when people go looking for knowledge about how to tread more lightly on the planet, they often look elsewhere rather than with their grandparents and elders. Luisa shared this not in a resenting way, but to point to the pressure of time to be always looking forward, moving forward (which I would translate as capitalist productivist logics). She saw this pressure as meaning “there is no time to slow down and have the slower conversations with older generations”. In addition to the importance of being included in a programme with societal relevance, Luisa felt she also had important contributions to make to the sustainability discussion. This was also reflected in the REDAM’s document in reference to SDG 15—Life on Land: “As society, we must take into account the experiences of older people, their knowledge of the territory and of gentle forms of production with the Earth. Generational bridges should be built to allow for the transmission of these knowledges” (REDAM, 2019, p. 4).

Having had the chance to understand the process that led to the creation of the REDAM’s SDG statement, I was very much looking forward to returning to Uruguay in early 2020 to see how the network was going to bring this document to life. Two factors coincided to make these plans impossible. First, after fifteen years of a progressive coalition government that achieved impressive and internationally recognised social gains, a conservative coalition won a fiercely contested election in the spring of 2019. This transition of government included the emptying out of many social institutions, including the National Institute for the Elderly which was the convenor of the REDAM. This process left REDAM a shell of its former self. It became clear that the work the network had been doing when I visited in early 2019 had, at least for the moment, been put to the side. The second factor was the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite these setbacks, Luisa and the REDAM’s work has made important contributions, both nationally and regionally, to thinking about age and sustainability.

Understandings of Ageing from an FPE Perspective

These two experiences speak to distinct dimensions of ageing in vastly different contexts. Nanako brings out the interdependencies of care between older women, fungi and machines as well as a look into community economies from an ageing perspective. Constance touches on older people’s agency and utilising civil society spaces to put forward their priorities at the intersection of sustainability and ageing. Despite the differences in these approaches to thinking about wellbeing in later life, putting them into dialogue has been fruitful for each of our understandings of ageing and has allowed us to carve out key insights at the intersection of ageing and FPE. In the following discussion, we draw out and elaborate on the broad themes of ageing and rurality, ageing and social/natural relations and community and economy.

Ageing and Rurality

Within studies on ageing, there is a clear divide between thinking about urban ageing and rural ageing in relation to demographic and social changes (Berry & Kirschner, 2013; World Health Organization, 2015). While insights into what distinguishes urban and rural ageing experiences can be helpful, this kind of binary thinking can also be limiting. In our above two studies, ageing experiences show that the urban and the rural settings are blurred; they are a web of different places, spaces, and environments where ageing experiences are materialised in everyday practices (Katz, 2018). In other words, the urban/rural divide obscures more than it illuminates; indeed, this picks up on wider literature within human geography that speaks of the rural as relational (Little, 2002). We also contribute to ageing geographies, which emphasise the ways older people interact with and are impacted by their environments (Andrews & Skinner, 2015; Skinner et al., 2015). As such, it may be more useful to relate ageing to individually unique experiences in everyday practices rather than to chronologically laid out demography (Aguirre Cuns & Scavino Solari, 2018; Katz, 2018).

Nanako’s case may seem to conform to “rural ageing thinking”, but Suisha’s business shows rural women’s engagement with ageing by encouraging rural and urban interchange. Generally, the rural population is more drastically ageing than urban areas due to people leaving the countryside for education and work in addition to the older generation living much longer than in the past (Berry & Kirschner, 2013), which raises concerns about the sustainability in the everyday practices in the rural context (Ôno, 2008; Tamazato, 2009). Yet, rurality in the Japanese context can also represent attraction or nostalgia connected with the rural landscape (Tanaka, 2017). A rustic, mosaic landscape with diverse vegetation is a cohabiting space of humans and nature, in which people manage natural resources as a part of traditional rural livelihood practices. That type of landscape, and its embodied human and non-human relationships, evoke nostalgia and affectionate feelings associated with the image of “hometown” or Kokyou/Furusato in Japanese (Yukawa, 2017). That positive association is used in attempts at rural revitalization to attract more people to come and visit, and eventually settle down in the countryside (Love, 2007; Tanaka, 2017). Instead of performing rural ageing in a frame of the rural and urban dichotomy, Suisha’s business showed experiences of ageing together. Suisha’s business model places the traditional food practices of “hand-made” and “locally-produced” in the semi-mountainous remote area at the centre of their business. By doing so, they build and use their rurality as a business tool to sell their food products and attract more people to visit the shop and restaurant. In this way, challenges emerging from the rural context are addressed by non-binary rural and urban actors as a response to the sustainability concerns in the ageing and depopulating rural context.

In the Uruguayan experience, with almost half of the country’s population living in the capital Montevideo, there exists a strong Montevideo/interior divide.Footnote 3 Though most of the REDAM members Constance came to know were from towns, the fact that they were from the interior positioned them differently—in a blurred, neither fully urban nor fully rural, experience. Many of these members faced the struggles of having to travel or relocate to access health and care services in larger centres, a common problem for rural ageing. And yet, through engaging in civil society spaces such as REDAM, many of these members’ access to and participation in national and regional policy and activist spaces is more indicative of what is typically thought of as an urban experience of ageing. With regard to the REDAM’s emphasis on sustainability, the network focuses on addressing climate issues as interconnected and brings together both urban and rural concerns. By virtue of being a national network with members representing each region and department of Uruguay, the REDAM has aimed to do justice to the specificity of its members’ diverse experiences while also articulating clear advocacy goals for the network as a whole. Their critique of the SDGs is a reflection of this. These examples add to the diversity of rural ageing experiences, underscoring the need for embodied and situated nuance.

Approach to Ageing and Social/Natural Relations

FPE’s intersectional thinking (Rocheleau et al., 1996) offers a grounding to analyse gendered social differences that are embodied in environmental engagements (Harcourt & Nelson, 2015). FPE’s relational thinking suggests a perspective that generation and age intersect with social differences, shaping power dynamics (Elmhirst et al., 2017; Nelson, 2017). Drawing on those strands of FPE, both our cases tease out the complexity of ageing people’s relations and open up new opportunities to understand how to care for others in the past, present, and future, beyond the binary between human and nature (Nightingale, 2013). Contrastingly, the approach we have each taken has brought out different understandings of environment.

By illuminating care for relational ties in everyday practices, Nanako’s case not only shows a space in which socionatural relationships emerge through Suisha’s business, but also questions the gaps in care between ageing rural women, miso, machines, and fungus. Ageing bodies experience lingering challenges in maintaining livelihoods with old fashioned machines and accessing social services such as elder care, even if Suisha’s business contributes to rural revitalization and the local economy. Thus, challenges come into play in shaping everyday ageing experiences in different places, spaces, and environments (Katz, 2018), yet these struggles also contribute to socionatural interdependencies. Still the gaps in care also demonstrate the need for additional services from social and political actors in the region.

With the more abstract entry point of discourses around the SDGs in the Uruguay case, Constance focused on how the REDAM’s members’ everyday practices of struggle. Their desires to be actively present in policy conversations about sustainability and care for the environment cross multiple temporalities. For some, the main motivation to participate touched upon hopes to protect and nurture places that had meaning for them, maintaining relationships to their pasts. Others were more motivated by the need to be heard, to be included in the debates, struggling against the invisibilising of older people. As mentioned, Lucia identified a responsibility to future generations as a motivation for her. Also, understandings of mutuality were prevalent in Uruguay, with participants speaking to the idea of treating the environment gently and it too will treat you gently.

Drawing on FPE’s approach to social and natural relations allows us to see that possibilities for continuing everyday life emerge from interactions of ageing others and different places and environments. Though not explored in depth in our narratives above, we found it interesting that people of varying ages participated in each of the groups. Some of the younger participants in both spaces spoke to the importance of investing in spaces for them to continue to be engaged and active in their own old age- an investment in a future temporality of sorts. While we started questioning the division in urban and rural ageing, our attempts of bringing ageing to FPE can shift the focus to tune in to other divisions between humans and nature, young and old, and other dichotomies alike.

Community Economies and Post-capitalist Perspectives on Ageing

Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s “being-in-common” (1991), post-capitalist community economies’ understanding of care offers insights into the interdependency of various economic beings and how individuals become communities in order to survive well together (Gibson-Graham, 2006). As shown in the Japanese case, ageing experiences embodied by rural women involve care for other humans and non-humans. Suisha’s survivall relies on caring for others and themselves in the ageing process; that is, not just ageing well individually, but also surviving well together with ageing others by appropriating profits gained from their food business for other-than-capitalist wellbeing. These practices that go beyond the binary thinking of capitalist and non-capitalist framing rest on care for others, and themselves in the context of an uncertain future cannot be static or decisive. By unravelling the process of how rural women make different decisions in everyday practices, Nanako’s case emphasised that ageing experiences are relational and constituted together with others based on their ethics of surviving well together. The ethics of care for others also embraces the sensibility of ageing with others, contributing to a collective experience and construction of ageing. Thus, post-capitalist thinking can highlight how actors are not framed by limited definitions such as women and men, human and nature, but rather, are seen as emerging economic beings (Nancy, 1991; Gibson-Graham, 2006).

Ageing beings are caring for others in both cases, constructing communities based on interdependent relationships through pursuing Suisha’s local business in Japan and climate justice from the elderly perspective in Uruguay. They produce and reproduce interdependent relationships, the foundation of community economies, rather than championing care as outside of profit making or denying capitalists’ way of wellbeing. This relational, non-binary thinking examines how to “survive well” together with humans and non-humans by balancing business practices and wellbeing while caring for the differently interdependent economic relationships (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013, p. 21).

Rupturist Gerontology

In analysing the Uruguayan case, rupturist gerontology (Piña Morán & Gómez Urrutia, 2019) helps to understand the link between age and gender by analysing social roles. Rupturist gerontologists and feminist writers both reject the framing of old age as a period “without activity” (ibid.; p. 14). This approach breaks with the idea of the elderly as “subjects of care”, overcoming the dichotomy of receivers and givers. Through this lens, care becomes a relational feature that informs our interactions with others and with life in its diversity. The complex motivations of the members of REDAM speak to this relational, sometimes contradictory, complexity. The clear demand to be seen and heard is an attempt to counter the invisibilisation of older people. Their choice as a collective to focus on an issue such as environmental sustainability speaks to their willingness to invest in future wellbeing they may not be present to enjoy. These are both motivations that are focused on building relations. REDAM members could thus be seen as demanding more care and demanding more contexts in which they can offer care. This relational approach to care, essential within FPE and articulated strongly within rupturist gerontology, places older people in relation with others, making decisions collectively and imagining new realities, recognising the knowledges, perspectives, shortcomings, experiences and limitations that are part and parcel of older people’s livelihoods.

Concluding Thoughts

In this chapter, we present a case for including ageing in the current contours of FPE research. In demonstrating the value of such an analysis, we have brought two distinct ageing experiences—Suisha, the women’s local business in Japan, and REDAM, a national network for older people in Uruguay—into the conversation. We highlighted that ageing is neither fixed nor binary but is about the embodied experiences and agency of older people. Our distinct theoretical groundings and our different interpretations of FPE allowed us to learn from each other’s case and deepen our understanding of our own. These threads emerged at the intersection of ageing and FPE, enriching the understanding of ageing experiences.

In both cases, we draw on ethics of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) in thinking about older people and the ageing process. The Suisha case shows care for kôji and other people in the past, present, and future, while REDAM’s case shows care for future generations by ageing people claiming their own presence. Understandings of socionatural relations have also helped us explore more deeply the layered relations in which ageing takes place.

Age is often overlooked or under-examined as both a dimension of power and as a bio-social process within FPE-inspired work. As both cases show, age is a central factor within embodied care practices and enhances the interdependency in socionatural relationships that support wellbeing. With ageing itself being a series of ongoing relational changes, we have made the case for what can be gained at the intersection of ageing and environment in the hopes that others also take up questions of age and intergenerational wellbeing within research on embodiment, socionatural relationality and everyday practices of care.