Product details
- ISBN 9780897894142
- Publication Date: 24 Jan 1995
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Mary Moore Free presents a new perspective on the literature of aging with her study of the rich, old, cognitively intact, powerful, formally retired, elite elders whose needs do not include nursing care. Living in a small private retirement home in urban Texas, the residents of The Hermitage continue to retain the power that they exercised in their active years by manipulating their environments, controlling inheritances, casting absentee ballots, and medicalizing their old age by forming partnerships with their doctors, thus relieving themselves of the personal responsibility of being old. In the expanding genre of retirement home ethnography, there is little on wealthy elders. Many who are able to give cogent life stories are unwilling to trade privacy for support of investigative studies. It is to Free's credit that she was able to win the residents' confidence and elicit another dimension of what institutionalized retirement can be like.
MARY MOORE FREE is House Anthropologist and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Baylor Health Care System/Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. She has published over 20 articles in anthropological and medical journals and has made five educational films on what it means to be old and group dynamics.
