Fnu Caihuajia

Focusing on Tibetan elders born in the mid-20th century before China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), this dissertation project will investigate the nexus between care and family and document how care-giving practices and family dynamics are changing in the broader context of China’s ongoing modernization efforts i.e., urbanization and resettlement in Tibetan communities. More specifically, I will examine the unsettling landscape of care and aging for Tibetans in tandem to family and home, inquiring how older Tibetans make sense of widening discrepancies and paradoxes between cultural ideals and lived experience. My focus on individual agency and the consequent dynamic changes in the house-home-family tripartite relationship will guide my research on care and aging in both rural and urban settings, linking them to larger processes of social change. Using participant observation, combined with interviews, life histories, archival research as well as pictures and videos, I will study what aging looks like for Tibetans today and explore emergent forms of care by addressing: (1) family relations; (2) shifting gender norms, (3) migration and mobility; and (4) the relationship between house, home and family within new social realities. This ethnographic research will reveal the complexities and nuances in the diversity of aging and care-giving.