Anthropological Journal of European Cultures

World's fairs and international exhibitions do not cease to fascinate researchers. Just as the objects, people and ideas on display at these massive events captivated their audiences, many humanities disciplines have studied exhibitions with similar curiosity and interest. A vast number of publications comprising articles, monographs, anthologies and special issues have been written on individual world's fairs, histories of exhibitions in a single country, or the participation of a specific country in the expositions. They are approached from various subject areas, but most commonly and fruitfully from anthropology, ethnography or ethnology, or from my discipline, which is the history of art and design. While all of these have different methods, they often share their study material. Historians of art and design have examined, for example, the architecture of fairs, the design of the grounds, and exhibits of the visual arts, but also performances and displays of native people. And this is where the interests of art history meet anthropology.

There are many different anthropological traditions of material culture studies in Europe, as well as beyond. And yet the materialities of age and ageing nevertheless tend to be neglected in anthropological studies of ageing-related matters. Through a range of case studies, this special issue of AJEC addresses this gap. The articles consider a diversity of theories, methodologies and empirical approaches to better understanding European landscapes of care and pressing gerontological concerns.

This article presents case studies of older women's survival strategies in domestic settings in the expensive city of Munich, based on ethnographic material from two research projects on women's precarious retirement and the use of technology in old age. The self-care routines developed by the women over time assemble mental strategies and attitudes, bodily practices and socio-material techniques integrated into a specific spatial setting. These routines help them adapt to their physical impairments under multiply precarious circumstances: the pensioners portrayed have limited retirement funds, and thus, cannot afford household assistance or technical aids or even moving to another flat or into assisted living. Delving into private life-worlds and approaching women's perspectives and vulnerable agency, provides fresh insights into the field of private dwellings, often neglected in studies on old age.

In this article, I discuss the way that the body becomes the crucial socio-material element of ageing in a future city when it is imagined in participatory workshops involving seniors, city officials and researchers and when this joint learning process is analysed through the lens of affect theory. The analysis shows how the materiality of bodies that move between places and with other human and nonhuman bodies adds to the anthropological understanding of ageing as an experienced and cultural phenomenon, as well as the understanding of ageing as a human–nonhuman assemblage. Furthermore, analysing participatory design processes through the lens of affects generates knowledge on how emotions participate in the making of boundaries that are essential when designing not only to cater to senior city dwellers, but also to anyone.

This article focuses on the co-constitution of the home and age(ing) in the retirement transition, that is, how the experiences of home change in the transition from work to retirement, and how the experiences of retiring change with transformations of the home. The article first outlines current literature on transitions in later life and the home. Subsequently, it presents data from the project ‘Doing Retiring’ along three lines of inquiry: meanings, practices and negotiations of and within the home, and how they change across the retirement transition. Finally, it discusses implications of understanding the transition from work to retirement and the home as not merely related, but co-constitutive. It concludes by suggesting a ‘doing’ approach to life course transitions which focuses on socio-material practices and thus offers a prominent place in transition research to spatiality, materiality and processuality.

Creative leisure occupations, such as arts and crafts, can give rise to meaningfulness. To date, much of what is known about meaningful occupations relates to verbalised meanings. This article assumes a sensory gaze to examine the tangible creative leisure occupations of three women in midlife. A sensory ethnographic approach comprising participant observation, a reflexive ethnography diary, and photo elicitation was augmented by semi-structured interviews, revealing the ways that meaningfulness is felt and sensed in the body through emplaced interactions with nonhuman elements: materials, objects, space and time. The findings provide fresh insights into embodied and emplaced experiences of meaningfulness in occupation in the context of meaningful ageing, illustrating how meaningfulness in occupation goes beyond what can be experienced or expressed in words, spanning both tangible and intangible themes.

The body is a site on which ageing occurs and is also the means by which we navigate and experience a material world. As our bodies change as we age, so too do our experiences of (and interactions with) our material environment. This article presents findings from an ethnographic study of the experiences of everyday life among residents of an older people's home in northern England. I draw on the concept of the ‘embodied life course’ (Marshall and Katz 2012) to argue that residents’ feelings about being and becoming at home were shaped by their embodied, temporal and socio-material experiences throughout their lives, and that these experiences continued throughout their time in the residential home.

Isabella Clough Marinaro (2022), Inhabiting Liminal Spaces: Informalities in Governance, Housing and Economic Activity in Contemporary Italy (London: Routledge), 232 pp., €136.94, ISBN: 9780367373634.

František Šistek (ed) (2021), Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe: Representations, Transfers and Exchanges (New York: Berghahn), 302 pp., $145 ISBN: 9781789207743.

Carrie Hertz (ed) (2021), Dressing with Purpose: Belonging and Resistance in Scandinavia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 260 pp., $30, ISBN: 9780253058577.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Marek Jakoubek (eds) (2019), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries Today: A Legacy of Fifty Years (London: Routledge), 232 pp., $128, ISBN: 9781138617650.

Martin Demant Frederiksen and Ida Harboe Knudsen (eds) (2021), Modern Folk Devils: Contemporary Constructions of Evil (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press), 296pp, $ 39.00 ISBN: 9789523690547.