系列：当代民族志
是什么造就了有意义的生活？在日本的语境中，池井的概念提供了线索。ikigai被翻译为“使一个人的生活有价值的东西”，它也意味着给人带来幸福的东西。在日本，老年公民的人口构成正在增长，新的生活方式和关系正在改变传统的多代家庭结构，池井敬二的老年经历被认为是一个公共卫生问题。如果没有一个有意义和快乐的老年模式，日本日益增长的老年人口必须创造新的文化形式，以来自老年的池井为中心。
在《创造有意义的生活》一书中，伊扎·卡维德žija对日本老年男女的生活和担忧进行了丰富的人类学描述。Kavedžija在大阪的两个社区中心进行了多年的人种学田野调查，她对自己活跃、独立的主题的存在问题进行了深入的叙事分析。这些社区的老年居民独自或成群结队地通过幽默、对话和讲故事来了解自己的生活，并改变池井。他们是护理的提供者和接受者，挑战了老年人脆弱和依赖的普遍形象，同时说明了一个更复杂的论点：保持独立仍然需要培养对他人的多重依赖。《创造有意义的生活》认为，老年人人类学特别适合研究相互竞争的价值观，即依赖与独立、社交与孤立、亲密与自由，人们必须在生命的各个阶段保持平衡。
Making Meaningful Lives: Tales from an Aging Japan
Series: Contemporary Ethnography
What makes for a meaningful life? In the Japanese context, the concept of ikigai provides a clue. Translated as “that which makes one’s life worth living,” ikigai has also come to mean that which gives a person happiness. In Japan, where the demographic cohort of elderly citizens is growing, and new modes of living and relationships are revising traditional multigenerational family structures, the elderly experience of ikigai is considered a public health concern. Without a relevant model for meaningful and joyful older age, the increasing older population of Japan must create new cultural forms that center the ikigai that comes from old age.
In Making Meaningful Lives, Iza Kavedžija provides a rich anthropological account of the lives and concerns of older Japanese women and men. Grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork at two community centers in Osaka, Kavedžija offers an intimate narrative analysis of the existential concerns of her active, independent subjects. Alone and in groups, the elderly residents of these communities make sense of their lives and shifting ikigai with humor, conversation, and storytelling. They are as much providers as recipients of care, challenging common images of the elderly as frail and dependent, while illustrating a more complex argument: maintaining independence nevertheless requires cultivating multiple dependences on others. Making Meaningful Lives argues that an anthropology of the elderly is uniquely suited to examine the competing values of dependence and independence, sociality and isolation, intimacy and freedom, that people must balance throughout all of life’s stages.
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