The negotiation of care network boundaries among different cultural and socio-economic groups in Indonesia

Abstract

In Indonesia, a rapidly ageing, middle-income country, the care for older people is by default a family responsibility. Yet cultural, religious, and socio-economic heterogeneity results in important variation in who is considered primarily responsible for care and how families negotiate care, especially when preferred carers are not available. This paper draws on ethnographic data from an ESRC project on later-life care networks in Indonesia. The five study sites across Indonesia include matrilineal, patrilineal, stem-family and nuclear-family systems, each with different care preferences, while also encompassing significant socio-economic variation. This allows investigation of how different subgroups manipulate boundaries around acceptable care, and the implications for the quality and sustainability of older people’s care. This reveals that on the whole, better off families flexibly expand their care networks, drawing in additional members to achieve a sustainable division of labour. Where normative solutions are unavailable – e.g. due to a lack of daughters – they successfully redefine the boundaries and nature of acceptable familial care. Reliance on paid care, for example, is presented within a kinship idiom. By contrast, poorer families often experience demographic and economic pressures on the provision of care. Childlessness, conflict (especially around inheritance or other assets) and long-term migration can result in small care networks and unstainable, inequitable care arrangements. In such circumstances, the identity of carers or the apparent lack of care needs are less the result of cultural or personal preferences than of familial power dynamics and a lack of options.

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ORCID for Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill: orcid.org/0000-0002-5071-8710

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