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ABSTRACT
Care, as it is instantiated through interaction, can both perform and shape cultural and moral understandings of what it means to be a person in the world. American Catholic nuns have been found to age more “successfully” than their peers. However, in contrast to the successful aging paradigm, an analysis of care interactions from research conducted in a Franciscan Catholic convent in the Midwestern United States reveals that the nuns practice an ideal of meaningful decline. I explore how linguistic analysis of care interactions evidence ideologies of personhood and aging, and how a model of meaningful decline (the notion that valuable personhood endures beyond productivity) is instantiated through interaction.
Acknowledgments
An earlier draft of this article benefitted from editorial comments from UCLA’s Mind Medicine and Culture Lab. Any remaining errors or oversights are my own. All research was conducted with IRB approval and individual and institutional consent. I am grateful for the sisters who participated in my research and who provided permission for me to use their word and images including video stills from the videos I recorded in the convent in my research.
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Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.
Notes
1. All names including the name of the convent are pseudonyms.
2. During my time in the convent, the Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart community was made up of a little over 200 nuns, a much smaller community than the 600+ sisters who lived in community during its height in the 1950s. Of the 200+ sisters in the community, approximately 100 sisters lived in the motherhouse, having retired from serving as teachers and missionaries outside the convent walls. These sisters resided in the convent full time, where they had access to nursing care. The remaining 100 or so sisters continued to serve in the community, living either at the motherhouse or in smaller convents, houses or apartments located near the community they served.
3. In this article, I refer to the nuns as “sisters,” a term the women used interchangeably with “nun” in the convent.
4. Transcription conventions:::: Colons indicate the elongation or stretching of the sound that immediately precedes them., Comma indicates continuing intonation.. A period indicates falling intonation.- A hyphen indicates interrupted speech or self-interruption.? A question mark indicates rising intonation.word Underlining indicates emphatic speech.(()) Double parentheses indicate transcriber’s description of ongoing activity.
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Anna I. Corwin
Anna I. Corwin is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Saint Mary’s College of California. She has published a number of articles examining the intersections between aging, embodiment, prayer, well-being, and social interaction.