LIFE OF OLDER PERSONS

It is a very hot day in an overly-crowded and polluted street in Jakarta. When the traffic light turns red, out of nowhere a group of people emerge and start approaching the cars and motorcycles, begging for money. This group includes some older men and women who have resorted to begging so as to make ends meet. In Singapore, another big city in Southeast Asia, older men and women do “odd jobs” such as cleaning dirty tables at hawker centres and public toilets. Is this the kind of employment older people are expected to take on in some parts of Southeast Asia?

In contrast, there are many older men and women in Indonesia who do not do “anything”. They live in beautiful houses; they travel a lot for leisure; and they have rich children to support them. One older man works for a family business run by his son; he enjoys the work, not because of the money, but because of the nature of the job and also because it keeps him occupied. He also partakes in the profit from this business. Moreover his wife enjoys her leisure; she pursues her time exercising, visiting friends, meeting her children, children-in-law, and grandchildren. A question arises regarding the kinds of activities one would expect older persons to engage in. We could also ask if an older person who engages in wage work is better off than someone who does not? In essence, what kind of life should older persons be leading?

This chapter represents a preliminary attempt to provide the first and important step at answering that question, by analysing the employment patterns of older women in Indonesia. It provides information on what the older persons, particularly older women, do within and outside the labour market. The analysis relies on a national data set collected in 2007. Therefore, readers need to be careful when generalizing the findings in this chapter beyond 2007.

INTRODUCTION

The population of Malaysia is ageing gradually. Between 1970 and 2010, the proportion of the population age 60 and above to the total population increased from 5.2 per cent to 7.9 per cent. The number of older persons increased more than fourfold from a little more than half a million in 1970 to 2.25 million in 2010. By 2020, the number of older persons is projected to reach 3.2 million out of a population of about 32 million. The various ethnic groups in Malaysia are at different stages of ageing. In 2010, 12.2 per cent of the Chinese were age 60 and above as compared to 6.2 per cent of the other indigenous groups, 7.3 per cent among the Malays, and 7.9 per cent among the Indians.

Life expectancy at birth has gone up from 66.5 years for males and 71 years for females during the early 1970s to 71.9 years for males and 77 years for females in 2010 (Department of Statistics 2001 and 2011). According to the 2010 life tables, of those who would be alive at age 55, the number of years expected to be lived is about 21.5 years for males and 24.5 years for females. Gender differentials in life expectancy at various ages have given rise to feminization of the older population.

Despite the substantial increase in life expectancy, the retirement age remains at 55 years until recently for workers in the private sector. However, following the adoption of the Minimum Retirement Age Act 2012 by Parliament in the June/July session, the minimum retirement age of 60 for private sector workers was gazetted on 1 January 2013, and came into effect on 1 July 2013. Retirement age in the public sector was raised from 55 to 56 in 2001, to 58 in 2008 and further to 60 in 2013. With structural changes in the economy, an increasing number of workers have moved from the informal to the formal sector, and are subject to mandatory retirement.

INTRODUCTION

The two most common concerns of nearly all people as they reach the elderly years are their health and their economic security. These concerns are intrinsically interrelated; health problems are generally more common at advanced ages, as is diminished earning capacity resulting from retirement and the cessation of productive activity. Specifically, when health problems increase in old age, the costs incurred in seeking healthcare become a greater concern for an elderly person since the individual would more likely have to rely on savings to meet this need. In developed countries, formal support systems in the form of retirement benefits and pension plans ensure that most people who exit from the labour force in their elderly years are assured of economic sustenance, while health insurance systems take care of much of the financial burden of healthcare. In developing countries like the Philippines, formal support systems are still underdeveloped. As such, the majority of older people still rely on the traditional and informal sources of support provide kin when they themselves are not able to ensure their own economic and health needs (World Bank 1994). One indicator of the lack of an adequate formal support system for older individuals is the higher rate of labour force participation at these ages compared with countries with formal retirement systems (United Nations 2007; United Nations 2002). Typically, in the absence of such a formal system, there is no fixed and mandatory retirement age and people continue economic activity as long as they are physically and mentally able to do so. This period can be fraught with economic uncertainty if failing health threatens the older person's capacity to continue to provide for his/her own needs and that of his/her dependents.

Another common concern is the gender dimension of work and retirement. Much of the literature plays up the potential for unequal vulnerability to adverse economic and health outcomes between men and women.

INTRODUCTION

Over the last decade, the growing size of Vietnam's older population has prompted the government to pay more attention to the well-being of this group (Bui et al. 2000; Nguyen 1998; VCPFC 2002). The proportion of Vietnamese adults age 60 and above is projected to rise substantially from 8 per cent in 2000 to 13 per cent in 2025 and over 25 per cent by the mid twenty-first century (United Nations 2007a). Female old-age vulnerability has been placed in the forefront of government-funded social programmes to improve the living standards of the old (HelpAge 2007; Mitchell and Khuat 2000; United Nations 2002, 2007b). Influenced by the dominant policy discourse on gender and ageing, Vietnamese policymakers are concerned that older women would be more susceptible than men to various forms of hardship because they tend to experience socioeconomic disadvantage in early life and to be widowed in older years (Giang and Pfau 2007a; Ofstedal et al. 2003).

Recently the disproportionate policy focus on older women's vulnerability has been increasingly criticized for its lack of consistent evidence and for its dismissal of men's potential disadvantages (Knodel and Ofstedal 2003). For example, while women might be inferior to men in the labour market, they are not necessarily more vulnerable in later life since female elders tend to be more protected socially by family and kin network support. These criticisms also extend to the prevailing perspective on gender and health equity which posits that women are more likely than men to have poor health at older ages. The issue is particularly relevant to Vietnam's recent efforts to address the healthcare needs of its older population. While healthcare provision for the elderly, especially for female elders who are less likely to receive pension and health insurance, has been discussed widely in the public sphere, little is known about the extent to which health status in older years varies by gender and what mechanisms lie behind male-female differences (Thanh Nien News 2009; Vietnam News 2008).

Over the last two decades, gender has moved steadily up the agenda of interdisciplinary population studies, beginning with a number of early programmatic statements (Mason 1993; Greenhalgh 1994; Obermeyer 1995), and continuing via substantial collections (e.g. Bledsoe, Lerner and Guyer 2000) and in-depth studies (Basu 1992; Bledsoe 2002; Johnson-Hanks 2006). The increasing focus among demographers over the same period on consequences of demographic transition has made the conjunction of two themes — ageing and gender — inescapable. Demographic data at the national level readily show potentially significant economic and social differentials between men and women, and these data have been used to make a general case for important gender disadvantages in later life, particularly for women. The impact of disadvantages, by implication, accumulates across the life course. Thus, in Indonesia, women's disadvantage is found in variables like the years of education they receive, their income stream, whether they participate equally in formal sector employment, enjoy equity in marriage choices, and have equal access to pensions (Malhotra 1991; Rudkin 1993; Adioetomo and Eggleston 1998; Kevane and Levine 2003; Samosir, Tuhiman and Asmanedi 2004). The accumulative effects of these differences, however, are less clear. Women participate extensively in intergenerational transfers, leading some commentators to conclude that gender differences in support provision for older people are “practically non-existent” (Frankenberg and Kuhn 2004, p. 27). General patterns of economic and social change in which elders receive support from both sons and daughters, and which often give particular emphasis to daughters' roles in providing personal care, continue to follow tradition. In other words, most elders appear to find that both daughters and sons deliver — even though some gendered aspects of the life course, and elders' expectations about gendered kinds of support, remain unequal.

Generalized statements of gender disadvantage or advantage, no matter how systematic the survey data on which they rely, can only take us part of the way to understanding whether and how gender differences actually impact on later life.

INTRODUCTION

The importance of gender is a major theme in both social research and policy discussions related to population ageing (Mehta 1997 and 2004; Troisi and Pawiliczko 2008; UN INSTRAW 1999). It is a prominent issue in the Plan of Action stemming from the 2002 Second World Assembly on Ageing (United Nations 2002). Typically, the focus is on inequalities that presumably disadvantage older women with respect to their social and economic well-being and their physical and mental health. Rarely are aspects of ageing for which men share vulnerability or are disadvantaged highlighted (Knodel and Ofstedal 2003). Given that the link between gender and ageing likely varies across time and settings, adequate assessments of their interaction need to move beyond assumptions of universal female disadvantage and explore the experiences of both older men and women in specific societal and temporal contexts. The present study contributes to such an effort by comparing the situations of older women and men in contemporary Thailand based on the latest national survey of older persons. It thus brings several previous studies of gender and ageing in Thailand up to date (Knodel 2004; Sobieszczyk et al. 2003; Soonthorndhada et al. 2008). In conformity with the conventional definition used in previous studies, we define the older population as persons age 60 and more years.

THAILAND's DEMOGRAPHIC, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

Population Ageing

Starting in the late 1960s, Thailand experienced rapid and extensive fertility decline and improvements in life expectancy. By 2005, average life expectancy at birth exceeded 68 years and the total fertility rate was below two children per woman. At the same time, driven primarily by fertility decline, the share of the Thai population age 60 and above more than doubled (United Nations 2009). According to government projections, population ageing will continue at a rapid pace with persons age 60 and older expected to constitute one fourth of the population by 2030 (NESDB 2007). The trend is relatively similar for the older male and female populations although ageing will occur at a modestly faster pace for women than for men.

INTRODUCTION

The issue of “care for” and “care by” older people has strong gender dimensions. Older women, extending the traditional role of caregiver and homemaker, tend to predominate as caregivers. Research has shown that as the life expectancy of older women surpasses that of men, they are more likely to provide care for their spouses rather than to receive it (ARROWs for Change 1999; UNESCAP 1991). Moreover, it has been documented that grandparenting is a role increasingly thrust upon older women by the younger generation of women entering the workforce because of the lack of suitable childcare facilities and services (Gray 2005; Ling 2007). However, in terms of receiving care, older women are found to be at the losing end, even to the extent of becoming vulnerable to neglect and abuse (Aitken and Griffin 1996; Whittaker 1995).

Research has also drawn attention to the possibility that older men may experience similar vulnerabilities to older women or in some aspects be even more disadvantaged (Knodel and Ofstedal 2003). Research has also shown that care of older people is strongly influenced by cultural norms, traditions of inheritance and exchange, and by different government services and income support systems. Generally, there is a difference between the way care is provided to older people in developed and developing economies, and in Southeast Asian regions, as much as in the rest of Asia, more emphasis has been placed on the family (Liu and Kendig 2000).

With an increasing ageing population in Sarawak, Malaysia, a culturally diverse society undergoing rapid urbanization, care of older persons is an issue that merits examination. This chapter explores the experiences of older men and women as caregivers and care-receivers in both formal and informal systems of care. Drawing on the findings of a larger study called Ageing in Sarawak: Needs, Impact and Emerging Issues (Social Development and Urbanisation Council 2005), this chapter examines the impact of gender on caregiving and care-receiving, taking into consideration rural/urban variations, socio-economic differences and, where relevant, ethnicity.

INTRODUCTION

Older women are often perceived as more vulnerable to social, economic, and health disadvantages. It is often surmised that gender discrimination is the main cause for the disadvantages they face. In situations where social structures reinforce such gender biases, particularly in education and employment opportunities, the cumulative effect of earlier life experiences render older women generally poorer than men. There are those who argue that the perceived disadvantaged position of older women may be an oversimplified global generalization which ignores the substantial variations in the relative situations of older men and women (Ofstedal, Reidy, and Knodel 2004; Knodel and Ofstedal 2003). In the Philippines, for example, the legal framework affirms equality for all citizens regardless of gender, which has helped ensure a relatively high degree of protection of its women. This is not to say that gender equality has been fully achieved, given the discrimination against women that continues to prevail in some sectors in the Philippines. It is thus important to understand the gender situation, particularly on the economic front among the older cohort, most of whom come from the generations that preceded the enactment of policies and programmes that have protected the rights and privileges of women in the country.

This chapter aims to provide an empirical analysis of the economic well-being of older Filipinos highlighting differences across gender and marital status groups. It explores the levels and differentials in economic status of older people using various objective and subjective indicators of economic well-being. The extent to which subjective and objective indicators of economic well-being interrelate with each other is likewise examined so as to generate a more appropriate measure for assessing the economic well-being of older Filipinos. This analysis is of importance in a low-income country such as the Philippines where a third of the country's population is currently living in poverty (UN OCHA, n.d.), with the older sector expected to be more vulnerable to economic liabilities.

Until recently, the violent conflict in Southern Thailand had been captured in terms of historical oppression by the Thai state, and the economic and social exclusion of the Malays as well as related questions of legitimacy. In contrast to these narratives, this book argues that an analysis of the meanings of violence should not be reduced to the facades of popular narratives and declared intentions, as such an approach would place scholars themselves at risk of becoming part of the process of staging violence. Accordingly, this book explores the hidden channels of communication and the organized violence behind such facades in order to understand the enduring rebellion, which moves beyond dichotomous notions such as nationalism versus jihad, “new” network-like organized versus “old” vertically organized armed groups, or claim-taking versus silence.

To understand these ambivalences, it is important to take into account the ability of insurgent groups to adjust to changing social and political contexts. Similar to companies in a free market, they have to adapt and innovate constantly. To be successful, they must develop new violent and non-violent strategies that are able to both undermine state legitimacy and mobilize the masses. They have to be innovative in terms of their ideological repertoire in order to gain charismatic appeal; however, in doing so, they must stay within the lines of what is culturally accepted. The cost of failure can be much greater for them than for companies, as violence is a brutal mechanism of selection: in the best case, they simply fall by the wayside, while in the worst case, their members are killed in significant numbers and their political objective is left unrealized.

In reaction to the defeat of earlier Malay rebellions in Southern Thailand, BRN-Coordinate underwent a major organizational adjustment. Although other separatist groups gave up their old-style guerrilla fights in the 1980s and 1990s, BRN-Coordinate proved to be astonishingly capable of re-designing itself, thereby establishing the foundation for the latest round of insurgency. This transformation was twofold in nature. First, instead of full-time guerrillas hiding in the jungle, the current insurgency is based on a part-time guerrilla-cum-terrorist force that hides in the villages and takes advantage of the state's limited control at the local level. Second, the group introduced village-based mass indoctrination using a mixture of nationalism and the jihadist thought that had become globally prominent.

A study on an armed group and communication cannot leave out an analysis of the actors that fill the organization with life and commit the violent acts. However, moving down the scale of observation from the mesolevel of organization, two fundamental questions typically arise. While the first question focuses on who the organizers of violence are in terms of an insurgent's social, economic, political as well as psychological background, the second question asks why. Here, there is a tendency to develop theories about prime motives such as greed, grievance, or the fight for a God-given or traditional order. In order to answer these questions in the face of the incomprehensibility of fanaticism and violence, there has been a tendency to search for a “terrorist profile” — a pattern of abnormality, which is thought to explain the involvement of an individual in a campaign of collective violence. Unfortunately, however, the research approaches that have thus far tackled this question, including individual psychological models and the so-called root-cause research, have substantially supported the thesis of a terrorist profile. Despite the fact that such a profile has yet to be found, profiling remains attractive in the face of a lack of data.

The first part this chapter considers the limited statistical evidence available about insurgents in order to challenge the assumption of a homogenous insurgent profile, one that supports the view of an economically or educationally deprived stratum as a recruiting ground for insurgents. In order to present the insurgency in a clearer light, the chapter then proceeds to set down the routes of three BRN-Coordinate members who perform different functions in the group. The aim here is to depart from the simple picture of BRN-Coordinate as a homogenous group that moulds all its members — in a totalling fashion — into brainwashed members (as Chapters 2 and 3, which described BRN-Coordinate as a rather formal model of a smoothly functioning system, may have indicated). Instead of focusing on how the “system” works, I will illustrate that from an actor perspective, motives and routes of involvement are marked by complexity as well as significantly diverging meanings, and that members can retain a degree of agency within the organization.

Popular discontent or a “crisis of legitimacy” are often assumed to stand in direct causal relation to the outbreak of insurgencies, regime changes, or revolutionary action. Such explanations are, however, problematic. Rebellious attitudes or preferences for a change in the status quo of a regime are unlikely to translate into collective action in a quasi-automatic fashion without the recruitment of insurgents who are willing to take the mortal risks of fighting an incumbent government. Every dissident who aims to generate collective action has to respond to the following question: what kind of appeal is most promising for encouraging people to join an organization seeking a public good?

Recruitment poses an immense challenge in societies with low capacity for horizontal organization. While some armed groups solve this problem by relying on less committed members motivated by material gratification or are coerced to fight, groups such as the IRA, the Vietcong, LTTE, or BRN-Coordinate, which work under the conditions of secrecy, must adopt a different recruitment strategy. Since clandestine groups are under constant threat of defection and betrayal, they tend to draw on individuals that strongly identify with the organization's objectives.

Accordingly, mobilization, military instruction, and the political indoctrination of members are key factors for the cohesion and success of armed groups. Drawing on Foucault's (1995) concept of subjectivation, Schlichte (2009) argues that armed groups expose their members to a double-edged process, socializing recruits into their symbols and practices.1 On one hand, training turns recruits into mobilized members, who are familiar with the symbolic codes of BRN-Coordinate, helping them to communicate with other members, and making them willing to turn against the ruling order — that is, using violent means and risking their lives. In other words, any cultural values and social institutions that inhibit the use of violence or suggest peaceful solutions to conflict must be overcome. On the other hand, recruits are subjected to a new system of domination within the armed group, namely, a disciplinary apparatus that includes the use of force.

In exploring this process, I will begin by illustrating the contexts in which BRN-Coordinate recruits new members. Following this, I will identify the “cultural repertoires” of agitation, which are used by recruiters, as well as the role of pre-existing social ties for gaining new members.

This book has its origins in the research project, “Religious Dimensions of Local Conflicts”, at the University of Passau, funded by the German Research Council (DFG) from 2006 to 2008. Studying one of the bloodiest conflicts in Southeast Asia, which has to date lasted nearly a decade, my initial task as a PhD student was to analyse religious discourses that served to legitimize violence in Southern Thailand in both Muslim and Buddhist discourses. At that point of the project, the latter was of particular interest to me because most research on the legitimacy of collective violence had neglected the Buddhist perspective. Upon further exploration, the fact that was most startling to me about the violence in Southern Thailand was, however, the near total absence of identifiable collective actors on the Malay Muslim insurgent side, which linked political demands with acts of violence in a similar fashion to the practices of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka or the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) in Myanmar. Since the outbreak of violence in Thailand's Malay- Muslim-dominated provinces (Narathiwat, Yala, and Pattani) in 2004, much has been written about the region and the causes of this bloody conflict. Nonetheless, little is known about the perpetrators of these violent acts, as the description as well as interpretation of data is impeded by a cloud of “nameless” violence that renders the identification of the actors and interests involved difficult. While acts of state violence against the Malay minority can be identified more or less easily, the motives and organization of those on the “other side” are all the more heavily cloaked in secrecy, deception, and speculation. Few rebel groups in Southeast Asia have been as successful in hiding themselves from the outside world for so long.

This contradiction was also reflected during my fieldwork, as despite the fact that there was an abundance of popular explanations of why Thailand's Malay minority demanded independence from the country as well as information about the political and economic conditions of the insurgency, the insurgents themselves were shrouded in darkness — although no credible source of information doubted their existence. It is always tempting to rely on popular explanations and treat them as self-explaining factors for collective violence, especially if they involve culture, ethnicity, or religion.

One of the most intriguing features of Southern Thailand's insurgency is the fact that rebels avoid taking credit for their violent deeds, leaving some observers to speak of a “conspiracy of silence”. In contrast to the practice of Basque or Northern Ireland's separatists, no warnings are provided before an attack, no identifiable demands are made in connection to the violence, and no group takes responsibility. Analysing such claims of responsibility is important because it grants access to what perpetrators demand and, partly, to what logic drives their violent behaviour. If armed groups refrain from taking responsibility, it is typically interpreted as a sign of pathological inversion or a fragmentation of armed actors who apparently have no clear political agenda. These groups are seemingly not interested in political mobilization and commit acts of violence only as a purely self-referential act.

This chapter argues that although BRN-Coordinate and other insurgent groups publicly avoid taking credit for their actions, violence in the three provinces can be understood as a highly communicative act if scholars move beyond the victim-perpetrator interaction to the wider symbolic function that violence has for different local audiences. Here, violence itself becomes a symbol and this facilitates its integration into social structures. The communication of organized forms of violence, such as civil wars, terrorism or insurgency, is closely connected to different collectives. Collectives serve as the organizers of violence, providing, for example, channels of communication, legitimacy, support for fighters, while it also integrates violence into the collective. Conversely, violence can also demarcate the borders of collectives.

These collectives do not necessarily correspond with ethnic borders, surely as not all Malays support the insurgency. Askew (2009, pp. 71– 76), for example, describes accounts of insurgency by non-supporters. If, however, the insurgency had no supporters beyond the insurgents themselves, it would be just a non-enduring, peripheral phenomenon in society. Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is not to evaluate the overall strength of support, but rather to identify popular accounts of Malay supporters and to explain how local acceptance of insurgent violence is connected to the stigmatization of Malay Muslims in the Thai nation state, as well as to the specific forms of insurgent violence. It will show that BRN-Coordinate employs demonstrative violence as a strategic tool, while identifying how the group attempts to actively manipulate the Malay population's reception of state as well as rebel violence.