1
Those left-behind Issues and adaptations by
older people in situations of rural
out-migration. John A. Vincent, Dept. of
Sociology, University of Exeter

• Paper presented to the Current and Future Pasts
  The 5th International Symposium on Cultural
  Gerontology/CABS 10th Anniversary Conference.
  Open University. 19th 21st May, 2005

2
Those left-behind

• Older people left behind by migration of their
  families, kin and neighbours from the rural areas
  of the developing world are amongst the most
  vulnerable and least studied of older people.

3
Those left-behind

• Have been studied from point of view of
• rural depopulation
• migration studies
• anthropology or folklore
• They have not been studied from the point of view
  of the older people themselves.

4
Those left-behind

• exploitation is the unpaid labour involved in the
  work of raising a family only to see them as
  adult workers disappear to another continent
• viewed from the outside in archetypical ageist
  terms, as backward lacking flexibility,
  innovativeness and initiative, as a useless
  remainder serving no useful social function.
• Social problem framework rural depopulation,
  marginality, service provision in rural areas.

5
Those left-behind

• How do older people adapt to life courses
  disrupted by out-migration?
• This paper is based on three comparative
  ethnographic case studies
• West of Ireland,
• Alpine Italy, and
• Bosnia.

6
County Clare 1966

• The rural West of Ireland in the 1960s was
  amongst the poorest parts of Europe.
• Now the Celtic tiger but at the time it was an
  area which had seen massive out-migration since
  the Irish famine
• In the 1950 and 60s many Irish people of both
  sexes moved to English cities and manual
  occupations.

7

• Irish identity is constructed in opposition to
  English identity.
• Irish nationalist intellectuals who drew on Irish
  history Gaelic in its Irish form and the
  stories legends and cultural forms.
• A folk tradition of the rural poor, drawn upon by
  the cultural entrepreneurs but was also informed
  by the nationalist revival.

8
Tommy Fahey

• A single man unmarried in his late fifties. By
  local reputation a very bad farmer because he
  drank but mostly because he was inattentive to
  his farm. He much preferred touring local
  hostelries to sing and perform his music. His
  music was nothing special, the local popular
  songs, a mixture of music hall ballads, country
  music and traditional songs sung unaccompanied
• But the place and the family name are identified
  with providing the minstrels to the kings of
  Connaught . Thus this ageing man, who failed to
  marry or to work his farm properly in marginal
  agriculture in a backward region was able to
  create an identity which placed himself in an
  ancient and revered tradition of Irishness.

9
Mary Daley

• I made a cultural error of a stranger. I said,
  you feel sad when your children have to go.
  Making the assumption that was obvious to an
  outsider, all the children left first to
  secondary school then to work in England. It
  almost reduced her to tears, no she said they
  wont have to go.

10
Val d'Aosta in 1970/1

• St Maurice was 500 people amongst the highest
  continuously inhabited villages in Europe. They
  were transhumant dairy farmers - making a cheese
  called Fontina. The local everyday language was a
  distinctive dialect which has also become a
  symbol of local identity.

11

• The elite and the landless poor left the rural
  areas while only the middle peasants, attached to
  the village by their ownership of land stayed
  behind. As the 20C progressed land lost its
  value, the successful members of the village
  elite educated their children who subsequently
  left to find professional employment.

12

• Mademoiselle A, taught me to speak Valdotain. She
  had emigrated to American with her father where
  she lived until she was twelve. She had been the
  school teacher but was now retired in her late
  sixties. He was very religious, and almost a
  recluse. She lived on her own in an enormous
  house. She lived in a house she could not afford
  to maintain and indeed was partial derelict,
  where it was both impractical and below her
  station to maintain herself. Large prestige house
  of previous generation now a liability,
  successful middle farmers building their own new
  modern houses. Joseph A. He was an old widower, a
  fit eighty year old. He also lived in large house
  in a different hamlet, although his property was
  partially let to an active farmer. He was also
  very isolated socially (partly for reason I
  outline below) but nevertheless well off by the
  standards of local older people because of a
  first world war American veterans pension.

13
Reciprocity and isolation

• There was an ethic of competitive equality.
  People strove to avoid putting themselves in
  superior or inferior positions to others.
• They had elaborate institutions of turn taking to
  avoid invidious notions of precedent.
• Important all favours where asked for not
  proffered, to avoid giving the potential for
  insult.

14
Local knowledge

• Traditional knowledge in a globalising world is
  being lost but some still value it and can be a
  source of status and self identity. Skills and
  knowledge of a good fruitier, could command by
  local standards good wages.. The shop keeper in
  chief-lieu also doubled as the local midwife.

15
Bosnia 1990

• With Zeljka Mudrovcic I conducted interviews with
  36 people and with members of the administration
  of the community in which they were living. We
  asked this sample of elderly people to recount
  their personal histories.

16

• Yugoslav policy to encourage labour migration.
  Many Bosnians went to work in Germany to
  participate in 1960/70s growth as gastarbieters.
  The Bosnia economy was supported by a large
  volume of Deutchmark remittances, and indeed the
  Mark was the effective currency of the area in
  times of economic crisis. There was considerable
  circulatory and return migration. There are major
  differences between urban and rural Bosnia. The
  standard of living decreased and dependence on
  agriculture and remittances increased the further
  away from Sarajevo that you went. Welfare was
  enterprise/industry based or for partizans.

17

• An older women woman, Nadia, in modern but run
  down house. Widow with niece for company/
  support. Her son was going to come and visit her.
  But when? He used to come but had not for a
  number of years. Still believed his return was
  imminent. He had married in Germany to a Yugoslav
  but not from their locality in Bosnia. There was
  little tangible evidence of continued support .
  Left behind women have to sustain a fragile
  fantasy of family broken by migration. The son
  who left as young man was now married with own
  family. Home had nothing tangible to offer to
  sustain a fading relationship.

18

• Some informants had grown up in families twenty
  or thirty strong. Crucially the senior women were
  in charge and its was daughters in law who were
  the workforce. It is daughters in law who most
  dislike the extended family obligations. So
  although she could say that her son was good to
  me, and the household was economically sound,
  the loss of expectations by an older woman that
  she should be in charge of large households with
  many female hands for the domestic activity,
  expresses itself in a feeling of loss.

19

• A Croat women in her late sixties proudly showed
  us her skill as a weaver. She had a large
  handloom in a room in her home and spun, dyed and
  wove local wool. She was concerned that these
  skills were being lost, that the young people did
  not value them. Without tourism or a folk revival
  movement such skills although they can provide
  meaningful identities for some older people seem
  destined to be lost.

20
Emergent themes.

• From these case examples it is possible to start
  to identify a number of themes. These strategies
  can only be understood through an appreciation of
  the specific circumstances in terms of history,
  geography, and social and economic change
  experienced through the life course of the older
  people themselves. Generalities about the left
  behind tend to be the banalities of laggards or
  social problems and not do justice to their
  situation either in terms of creative adaptation
  and meaningfulness or in terms of the real causes
  of personal distress.

21
Sustaining illusions.

• From a phenomenological point of view one persons
  illusions is anothers reality.
• some older people left behind might be labelled
  deny-ers. This adaptation involves work to
  sustain the image of important values in the
  absence of interaction which would normally
  sustain them. The masks of a loving family is
  sustained in the absence of the sons, daughters
  and relatives who make up the family. The little
  tokens, the occasional visit, the promise to
  return made long age, are cherished and defended
  against absence and neglect. Similarly the Irish
  woman who could not face that her children would
  leave and migrate away from the locality.

22

• The illusions sustainable by distance are not
  only on the part of those left behind. The
  illusion of the homeland, the community of origin
  of migrants create important illusions by which
  life in the urban diasporas become liveable. The
  rural idyll has all the illusions of a tourist
  brochure with a thick layering of nostalgia for
  an idealised way of life. Healthy food, fresh
  air, good companionship, and holidays with granny
  can sustain these illusions or at least the dream
  of return tasties from the home farm can be sent
  and received and the aroma of home seep nostalgia
  into the nostrils of the migrant.

23

• Those left behind can become symbols of another
  era, or a time of a pure rural folk life and as
  such stand for ethnic nationalism.
• These can have a positive side in legitimising
  subsidies and pensions for the rural margins and
  lead to cultural productions of music, cuisine
  etc.
• It can also have a negative side as bearers of
  ancient grievances and antagonisms. In Ireland
  and Bosnia a strong case can be made that those
  in the diaspora, with only memories of ancient
  hatred from a previous generation, rather than
  current inhabitants, funded and fuelled violent
  nationalist movements.

24
Family, kin and community

• Marriage and households in most peasant
  communities are are embedded in sex segregated
  communities where mens and womens lives are
  very different. Typically men found their
  companionship with other men in public arenas,
  while women found their mutual support in a
  domestic environment. If out migration breaks up
  these support networks, if the women find they
  are stuck with just the old man at home and do
  not have a house full of daughters or daughters
  in law and grandchildren the experience is one of
  loneliness and loss.

25

• The size and density of the population left
  behind may be insufficient to sustain local
  social institutions. For example in the Val
  dAosta the annual communal baking of bread
  requires sufficient families to co-operate.
  Enough men to cut the wood and stoke the oven to
  keep it hot over the three of four days necessary
  to bake enough loaves to dry and store for the
  year to come. The real constraint was having
  enough women to knead and prepare the dough in
  loaves ready for baking. Sufficient women to bake
  the annual bread communally becomes having
  sufficient partners of the right social standing
  willing to be a farm spouse and sustain family
  and kinship institutions.

26

• There are variety of explanations for high rates
  of celibacy in different parts of Europe from a
  cultural adaptation to over population, partable
  inheritance, environmental crisis and
  depopulation. However it is clear that such high
  rates of celibacy amongst those left behind has
  considerable consequences in terms of support and
  personal care.
• There is a cultural divide between the West with
  its emphasis on nuclear families and new
  households created at marriage to traditions of
  extended families with an acceptance of more than
  one conjugal couple in a household. The former
  are more prone to celibacy, whereas in other
  cultures such a status is unthinkable.

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Conclusion

• Cautionary tales about over generalisation, and
  the distortions and blinkers that can arise from
  a social problems perspective.
• We can find heart-warming tails of success in
  adapting to out migration and declining
  institutions e.g. weaver in Bosnia finding pride
  and recognition for her skill. But many more
  tales of rural isolation and dire poverty, where
  the fantasy of familial support is no substitute
  for someone to help bath and feed a frail and
  infirm older person.