Greying mutuality: race and joking relations in a South African nursing home

Abstract

This article describes how residents and staff of an eldercare and Alzheimer's home in a small South African town joke with each other. Residents are mostly white and staff mostly black, but there are exceptions, and both groups are multilingual. Jokes between the two groups in the home are racialized, if not sometimes racist, in light of historical and contemporary post-apartheid socio-political and economic circumstances. Yet the relations between these two groups are forged mostly in joking about residents’ diminished cognitive and bodily abilities, staff work, multilingualism and interpersonal ties. In describing joking encounters in three ethnographic scenes, the article traces the ways in which age and race combine in institutionalized relationships of dependency to innovate social theory about human mutuality from the vantage point of multiracial, multicultural, postcolonial Africa.

Visiting Hours: Spacetimes of Human–Animal Interaction in South African Elder Care

“…In 2019, a research assistant Tamia Botes aided me in participant observation, interviews, and translations of recordings and documents in Afrikaans. Three institutional review boards—two in the United States one in South Africa—approved a larger project on racism and aging in post‐apartheid South Africa (Golomski 2020), of which this article offers select findings.…”

“Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is a Mystery”: Dying in South African Frail Care

“…Despite these efforts, many black South Africans found this to be inconsequential or incapable of culturally conveying their experiences of suffering in the form of self-referential, individuated narratives (Krog, Mpolweni, and Ratele 2009;Makoni 2008). In the few instances where black staff and white residents talked openly among each other about apartheid or the history of colonialism, these quickly transformed into joking situations, sacrificing personal or political standpoints for a necessity to be amicable as part of their role in the caregiving-resident relationship (Golomski 2020).…”

Gentleness

“…When experiences of these pasts did emerge amid gerontological activities of daily living, people made jokes or prayerful comments in response. These were not so much to shoo away historical truths-which were chalked up as part of a largely foregone past-but rather to sustain a form of mutuality needed to go on working and living together (Golomski 2020a(Golomski , 2020b)-a microcosmic formation of gentleness otherwise seen in national imperatives for reconciliation in the aftermath of apartheid.…”