Translocal Ageing in the Global East

Book excerpt: This book is about ageing in Bulgaria. How do Bulgaria’s elderly—abandoned by the state and left behind by their adult children and grandchildren—adapt to their continuously shifting environment and a state of perpetual uncertainty? Drawing on dozens of interviews with older people in Bulgaria’s capital Sofia as well as a village in the Bulgarian Balkans, Iossifova unravels how the dramatic socio-political transitions of the past eighty years have influenced the lifecourse of older people today. She carefully traces their patterns of everyday life in order to draw out the mechanisms through which older people cope with their meagre pensions, sustain their ailing bodies and make do in their tattered homes. Iossifova argues that ‘ageing in place’ as a popular paradigm underpinning neoliberal policy agendas has no place in Bulgaria and the wider Global East, where translocal ageing is the norm.