Jason Danely's "Fragile Resonance"

Jason Danely is Reader in Anthropology and Chair of the Healthy Ageing and Care Research Innovation and Knowledge Exchange Network at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author or coeditor of Aging and Loss, Vulnerability and the Politics of Care, and Transitions and Transformations.

Danely applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Fragile Resonance: Caring for Older Family Members in Japan and England, and reported the following:

What's on page 99: The end of a section titled 'Dancing with Danger' and the start of another titled 'Eating Intimacy'. These are two of my favourite sections, both looking at Japanese carers' descriptions of embodied and responsive care.

The test: Page 99 introduces some of the main themes of the book, but it doesn't capture the cross-cultural comparative approach, so the test was about 1/2 successful.

As page 99 suggests, the book is about the stories of carers' ordinary experiences and how these developed over time into new ways of attending to and responding to the world. Care entails a kind of attunement, like a dance, but cultivating this sensitivity can be exhausting, isolating, and little appreciated. Page 99 extends this with the Japanese notion of compassion. One of my favourite lines on this page is "Carers dance creatively, carefully, often on the edge of a cliff of dangerous compassion."

Visit Jason Danely's website.

--Marshal Zeringue