Dissertation-Flaherty-Attempt 1
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Growing Old Alone: Disregard, Care and End of Life in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology by Devin St Clair Flaherty 2018 © Devin St Clair Flaherty 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Growing Old Alone: Disregard, Care and End of Life in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands by Devin St Clair Flaherty Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Professor Christopher J. Throop, Chair This dissertation addresses possibilities for aging and end of life on the Caribbean island of St. Croix in the unincorporated territory of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the territory, the dissertation focuses on experiences of focal participants near the end of life, alongside the familial, institutional, and broader political and historical contexts shaping those experiences. Central to all of these domains, I argue, is disregard. Advancing disregard as a central analytic and phenomenon for understanding aging and end of life on St. Croix, I present a theoretical framework that considers the work of disregard and attention through time—over historical time at the level of the state and over the life course at the interpersonal level. I theorize disregard as manifesting through bureaucratic, !ii interpersonal, and experiential modes, and illustrate these different modes with ethnographic cases. Section I, “Introduction and Theoretical Framework,” introduces the study’s aims and methods, situating it within literatures in global aging and the anthropologies of care and end of life, and then advancing a theory of disregard for use within anthropology.
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