Keeping quiet: aging, personhood, and intergenerational harmony in rural Central Tibet

In aging studies, personhood has become a common lens through which to understand the multitude of aging experiences. It has been shown that conceptions of personhood predispose certain patterns of relationship, however, there is a dearth of research directly applying the framework of personhood to the study of intergenerational relations in late life. This paper explicitly examines the ways in which notions of personhood impact intergenerational relationships, specifically between village elders and their caregiving adult offspring, through an ethnographic study in a farming village in the Phenpo region of Central Tibet. Specifically, I explore how Phenpo personhood, which stresses both relationalism and individualism, is constructed. I then illustrate how these two dimensions of personhood undergird a harmonious relationship between generations that values dependency but allows room for independence. The analytic lens of personhood thus opens up new ways of investigating aging, care, and what binds generations together.