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ABSTRACT
Middle-aged, working- and middle-class people in urban Northern Thailand are using demographic categories to imagine their future identities as ‘senior citizens’. I here introduce the term demographic imaginary to provide a conceptual framework for understanding how characterizations of the population at large are constructed, take hold, and shape group identification. More than simply justification for study and action, demographic categories and prognoses are key components of the social world made visible in narratives at the micro- and macro-social levels. With careful ethnographic attention to the stories people tell and those they refuse, I argue a synchronic future is at play in the present, underscoring the importance of narratives about the future for the lived experience of today.
Acknowledgments
This study was approved by the Harvard University Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research (Application Number: F16442-101). Many thanks to Elana Buch, Chris Dole, Jennifer Hamilton, Kate Mason, Lenore Manderson, Lynn Morgan, Sahar Sadjadi, Boone Sheare, Scott Stonington, and three terrific anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback.
Funding
Funding was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Harvard Sinclair Kennedy Fund.
Notes
1. All personal and organizational names are pseudonyms.
2. Cornelius Castoriadis posited the “radical imaginary” as the human capacity to create possibilities in general, and the “social imaginary” as that aspect of the radical imaginary that builds upon the symbolic system of a given society (Castoriadis Citation1987). The social imaginary is akin to a shared background, which finds its expression in “images, stories, and legends,” rather than “explicit doctrine” (Taylor Citation2002:106–107). Like the “medical imaginary” (Good Citation2010) and the “pharmaceutical imaginary” (Jenkins Citation2010), the demographic imaginary aims to frame a more targeted analysis than the social imaginary provides.
3. At the time of research (2008–2009), Thailand had not yet achieved “aging society” status nationwide, though older people made up over seven percent of the Chiangmai population. At the time of writing (2016), projections remain on track for the number of older people to surpass the number of children under 15 by 2018.
4. Class dynamics are at work here. Bert is not as well off as Brapin, though neither is Boonsii—and all have idyllic visions at play. In the main, class dynamics emerge in word choice (old folks vs. senior citizen, for instance), but much stays constant across working and middle classes: medical care and community improvements.
5. Traditional Thai medicine was not emphasized, although it may be implied in other aspects of community life.
6. The “rhetoric of descent” (Rutherford Citation2013) is powerful in moments of potential catastrophe. Just as global warming is presented at the (trans)national level as a crisis for future generations, population aging is heralded as a coming catastrophe for families. A demographic imaginary of impending crisis at the policy level urges states to prepare for care of upcoming generations, though interestingly tends not to produce in citizens a “sense of continuity,” but rather “a sense of potential rupture” (Rutherford Citation2013:262). In the case of population aging, this is less a matter of the luxury of worrying about one’s children’s children and more the press of the projected for oneself. Most people with whom I worked had experience providing care for elderly people, whether professionally or personally, and the long hours of such work gave immediacy and shape to their future ideals.
7. For demographic statistics serving as “not merely fact but fodder for a politics of cultural struggle,” see Krause (Citation2001:576); for a social constructivist depiction of demography, see Greenhalgh (Citation1996).
8. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this insight.
9. Much contemporary work seems on the brink of direct engagement with people’s contemplation of the future, and I thank Charles Hallisey for the notion of an “anthropology of the future” (personal communication).
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Felicity Aulino
Felicity Aulino is Five-College Assistant Professor of Anthropology based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is currently Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University.