Title: Moral status of care for the elderly: case study of a nursing home in San Miguel de Sema, Boyacá. Colombia »
Title: Moral status of care for the elderly: case study of a nursing home in San Miguel de Sema, Boyacá. Colombia »
Author:
De La Hoz Del Real, Clara, UVSQ
Abstract:
For several decades, global rural areas have undergone profound transformations driven by economic, political, and socio-environmental dynamics. These changes disrupt traditional peasant ways of life and raise critical issues related to food security, the transmission of local knowledge, and the long-term sustainability of rural territories. In Colombia, neoliberal policies coupled with the prolonged effects of armed conflict have significantly reshaped rural areas, drastically altering traditional peasant lives. In San Miguel de Sema, in the department of Boyacá, these dynamics have resulted in a radical transformation of the natural landscape, a restructuring of the local economy, and sustained migratory flows, particularly of young people moving to urban centers. This migration has accelerated population aging, undermining both the continuity of production systems and the traditional family-based webs of care historically responsible for providing moral, material, and affective support to the elderly. In this context, certain elderly are accommodated in a nursing home, where institutionalized care restructures both the practical and moral functions of the traditional webs of care. The analysis aims to understand the conditions for the emergence of a new moral status of care within the institution, as well as the tensions this engenders: between moral obligation and normative framework, between benevolence and restricted autonomy, and between the preservation of dignity and institutionalized maternalism. This ethnographic work demonstrates how these dynamics contribute to a reduction in moral agency, constituting a form of terminality in which the lives of the elderly unfold under conditions of disempowerment and limited social recognition.
Key words: rural population aging, institutionalized care, moral agency, moral status, webs of care.
