Janey Workshop 2016/2017: Guillermina Altomonte – April 3
Please join us on Monday, April 3, 2017, 12-2 pm, for our session of the 2016-17 Janey Annual Workshop.
Guillermina Altomonte (Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology) will present her ongoing work “‘Ya no hay nanas’: Luxury Nursing Homes and the Institutional Reproduction of Domestic Servitude in Chile”. Elisa Taber (Dept. of Anthropology) will be commenting.
The Janey Workshop takes place at 80 5th Ave, Room G 529.
Abstract:
This article interrogates the success of a new market in Chile: nursing homes and assisted living facilities that cater to the upper class. Modeled after the U.S. nursing home business, these organizations emerge in a local context in which rising wages and increasing labor regulations for domestic workers seem to be curtailing the historically open-ended supply of domestic care in wealthy homes. Drawing on 20 interviews with providers and consumers of luxury nursing home care in Santiago, I examine the connections between the shifting landscape of paid domestic labor and the legitimation of these institutions as an acceptable choice for elder care. Luxury nursing home managers define their institutions as a luxurious extension of the home by resorting to gender and class distinctions that frame residents as heads of household whereas female aides and housekeepers are rhetorically constructed as domestic servants, or nanas. In turn, families and elderly residents view luxury nursing homes as a practical substitute for paid domestic work and care previously provided in their homes, while resenting the explicit partitioning and commodification of this labor in an institutional context. I thus suggest that in their struggle to achieve cultural legitimacy, these “modern” institutions create continuities with a deeply rooted culture of domestic servitude that provides wealthy clientele with a sense of entitlement. By exposing the convergences and divergences between imported industries of care and local “cultures of servitude,” I shift the focus from the migration of workers to the migration of institutions as a critical feature in the study of global chains of care.
*For full paper email janeyprogram@newschool.edu*
Looking forward to seeing you there.