Flexible hips? On Alzheimer's disease and aging in Brazil.
This article examines one aspect of Alzheimer's disease, which describes it as a "memory disease". In the specific context of urban Brazil this relatively new illness category, which is creating a certain tension with older concepts of senility, is seen within the changing world of the Country's memory politics - and a changing culture of aging - which create new values and new ways of dealing with memory and its diseases. An important aspect of the older notion of senility is the way a person creatively and in a flexible way deals with life's stress and strain. And part of this highly valued flexibility is the capacity of forgetting negative events, of "letting go". The incapacity of this, not having "flexible hips", is one reason of becoming ill. It is not argued that a changing cultural context in Brazil is creating a disease like Alzheimer's, but that certain memory practices help to explain, to live and to contest traditional and new ways of dealing with senility and that this process is a dynamic one and still in the beginning in Brazil.
Leibing
Annette
A
Institute of Psychiatry, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. leibing@attglobal.net