(Re)imagining aging lives: ethnographic narratives of Muslim women in diaspora

This article explores the potential of the narrative genre in (re)imagining aging lives of women in diaspora, spanning cultures as well as generations. Minimal attention given to combined constituencies of gender, age and minority status in feminist ethnography and the literature on aging may be redressed by the realization that minority aging women negotiate culturally based and innovative strategies to overcome patriarchal, age-based and colonizing and postcolonizing constraints. Ethnographic narratives of two Ismaili Muslim Canadian women, as part of a cohort of immigrants from East Africa, provide insights into the complex process of reimagining lives in-between spaces of home work and waged work as well as in-between action and repose (silence, and stillness that complement mundane action-oriented activities) modes of the Ismaili tradition. The narratives are a living metaphor of lives engaged in recapturing meaning. As such, the creative endeavors of aging women in diaspora has implications for a feminist ethnography of aging -- an area that to date remains substantively unexplored.