ABOUT THIS BOOK

Growing Old on the Margins is a moving portrait of aging at the edge of social life. Set in a state-run shelter for older adults in urban Lima, Peru, the book traces the everyday lives of men and women who have been left behind by family, institutions, and the promises of care. Based on more than two years of close ethnographic engagement, it follows residents as they navigate loneliness, illness, intimacy, and the quiet anticipation of death. Through small gestures—shared silences, requests for affection, moments of tenderness and conflict—the book reveals how people strive to remain present in a world that offers them little reason to hope. Care appears here not as a simple act of kindness, but as a fragile and uneven practice, shaped by scarcity, power, and moral ambiguity. Attentive to suffering without romanticizing it, Growing Old on the Margins reflects on what it means to age, endure, and remain human when one’s life is no longer considered worthy of attention.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

MAGDALENA ZEGARRA CHIAPPORI is a British Academy International Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Her work has been published in Anthropology News, The Lancet Respiratory Magazine, Medical Anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, Anthropology and Humanism, Anthropology and Aging, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

REVIEWS

“Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori’s compassionate account of what it is like to be old, indigent, and abandoned not only confronts us with the sociopolitical forces that deny value to so many human lives, it testifies to the small gestures that make life bearable under even the most demoralizing conditions.”

— Michael D. Jackson, author of Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want

“How difficult it is to provide dignified care for the old—especially in a deeply unequal society where there are never enough resources to support the work of the caregivers. This sophisticated, compassionate, and gripping book has much to teach us all as it painstakingly uncovers the meaningful lives, against tall odds, of people at society’s margins.”

— Jessaca B. Leinaweaver, coauthor of Care and Agency: The Andean Community through the Eyes of Children

“As societies age, this richly textured ethnography takes us inside a Peruvian shelter where destitute elders—confronting abandonment and precarious care—insist on living through friendship, humor, and vital acts. With her incisive concept of ‘remaining,’ Zegarra Chiappori delivers a landmark for the anthropology of aging and futurity in Latin America and beyond.”

— João Biehl, Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

1 The Weight of Abandonment: Family Disappearance, Perennial

Waiting for Loved Ones, and the Need for Presence

2 The Shades of Intimacy: Forging Connections, Reinforcing

Exclusion, and Turning Hierarchies Upside Down at La Merced

3 Amarrados, Respect, Mistreatment, and Cariño:

The Ambiguity of Precarious Care

4 Vulnerable Lives, Irrelevant Deaths? Dying Alone

and Receiving Flawed Care in La Merced

5 Remaining: On Vital Acts and Inhabiting Possibility

Conclusion: Toward a Culture/Anthropology of Care

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index