The third AGENET webinar in 2023 hosted Maria Louw (Centre for the Study of Ethics and Community, Aarhus University, Denmark) with a talk on Aging in the absence of the young: Specters of possibility at the margins of lives and worlds. It took place on 27th September at 14:00 – 16:00 CEST. Unfortunately, there is no recording available.
About the talk:
Maria Louw’s presentation took a point of departure in a recent project of hers which focused on older Kyrgyz Muslims who become old in the absence of younger relatives: A project which formed part of a larger cross-disciplinary project, “Aging as a Human Condition. Radical Uncertainty and the Search for a Good (Old) Life”: https://projects.au.dk/thegoodoldlife/
In the presentation, Maria reflected on what a focus on persons who find themselves on the margins of lives and worlds may teach us about the role of possibility in human life. The anthropology of possibility – and the phenomenological traditions it often draws on – has predominantly been oriented toward the future, the not-yet. Dwelling into the experiences of her interlocutors and drawing on the critical phenomenology of Alia Al-Saji, Maria explored the what-might-have-been as space of possibility that is equally important in human life as a space in which one may dwell and even thrive, and which may gain in importance as a person becomes older. Understanding the existential importance of the might-have-been, she argues, demand that we see the past, not as frozen and inert, but as a space of possibility that keeps opening in new ways. She finds the inspiration for doing so in the Kyrgyz concept of qayip duino (the hidden or unseen world) and Al-Saji’s concept of hesitation.
About the speaker:
Maria Louw is associate professor in anthropology and leader of the Centre for the Study of Ethics and Community at Aarhus University. Her research interests include religion and secularism, ethics, care, spectrality, phenomenology, and imagistic anthropology. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. She is currently working on a book with the working title “Spectral Ethics: Rebuilding Moral Worlds in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.”