COUNTER-DEMOGRAPHY: SITUATED CARING FOR THE AGED IN ANDEAN PERU

Abstract

I argue that non-demographers engage in “counter-demography” – repurposing demographic tools as they interpret and manage local, individual expressions of complex population-level issues. I explore this through a focus on population aging in Peru. Like many developing countries, Peru is in a delicate demographic position where sometimes violent efforts to reduce fertility, and broader processes of modernization and education, have resulted in population aging. In the urban Andes, professional aging-workers (those who labor to support aging individuals) informally reference statistics and data visualizations to highlight their own complex and holistic efforts to support aging people on the ground.

In 2012 I visited my goddaughter Olivia, an entrepreneur in her twenties who lives in her parents’ home in the sprawling outskirts of the city of Ayacucho, Peru. Meche, a social worker friend of Olivia’s, had stopped by for lunch too. As we ate and visited, they told me about the new governmental supports in place for older people since my previous trip to Peru – comparing it to the pension, the employee bonus, and the government cash transfer programs for schoolchildren. They explained that “This money is for old people who don’t work anymore, and don’t contribute, but they are Peruvians like the rest of us, so the state gives them money.” Meche and Olivia criticized the program’s sweep: “yes, it’s good that people who need it get help. But it should only go to those in extreme poverty.” When I asked how that was measured, Meche defined it by location, listing three departments (Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurimac) “in extreme poverty.” Location is a common bureaucratic shorthand for poverty in Peru – there is “a tendency to bundle these indicators [of poverty and inequality] together to convey an image of abject social exclusion that is distinctly spatial and can be assessed visually” (Skrabut 2018:6). By contrast, Olivia tied extreme poverty to income, and whether you had enough for the “canasta basica,” the government-defined “market basket” indicator representing the cost of basic foodstuffs for an individual or family.

In our lunchtime conversation, both young women were speaking casually, not as professional caregivers for the aged or demographers charged with documenting population change. But their evaluations considered formal notions of spatialized, ranked populations that circulate far beyond statistical analyses and policies. In this article, I identify a phenomenon I call “counter-demography” – the repurposing of formal demographic tools and findings toward individual interpretations of, and everyday efforts to manage, local and individual expressions of complex population-level issues. When they engage in counter-demography, ordinary Peruvians are not necessarily reaching different conclusions than those enshrined in law or policy – rather, they are engaging with and resignifying demographic ideas as they reckon with concepts that expand beyond their immediate experiences.

I explore this issue through a particular focus on population aging. Demographers define population aging “as an increasing median age of a population or an alteration in the age structure of a population, so that elderly persons are increasingly represented within a country’s overall age structure” (Shrestha 2000:204). Population aging is a subject of significant concern in some of the world’s wealthiest countries, where it is equated to economic drains on pensions and health care as well as harder-to-measure effects on social cohesion (Grant et al. 2004). But population aging is also occurring, and at a faster rate, in developing countries, where the consequences of these demographic changes are exacerbated by poverty (He et al 2016:1; Cotlear 2010:31).

The Peruvian Government’s National Plan for Older Adults 2013-2017 concurs: “…in Peru, as in many other Latin American countries, a progressive process of aging is occurring, one which will increase in the first part of the twenty-first century” (2013:22). Like many developing countries, Peru is in a delicate demographic position in which broader dynamics linked to modernization and education (Leinaweaver 2013, Thornton 2001:454), together with intense, sometimes harmful efforts during the 1990s to curtail the reproduction of rural indigenous women (Aramburú 2014; Ewig 2006; Molina 2017; see Colen 1995 on stratified reproduction), have resulted in a steep decline in fertility rates. One outcome of reduced fertility is what demographers call “population aging” – in that fewer infants being born results in a larger proportion of older people in the overall population.¹ In this article, I consider some of the implications of decreased fertility that are further downstream – how they take shape in conversations around population aging, and the relationship of “population aging” to actual aging persons, in Ayacucho, a Peruvian regional capital.

The global spread of ideas about population aging, and the tools and strategies that are often used to represent it as a concept, have made possible an interesting social phenomenon wherein professional aging-workers (that is, those whose professional labor supports aging individuals) respond to and incorporate demographic tools, and the critiques thereof, in their own work and thinking. In this article, I show how professional aging-workers engage in what I call “counter-demography” – they repurpose formal demographic tools and findings (such as statistics and data visualizations), using them as foils to highlight their own complex and holistic efforts to support aging people on the ground, and to be able to more clearly state their philosophy of aging through the power of comparison. Those comparisons are not always evidence of a stark contrast between their everyday labor and the efforts of the Peruvian government – given that the government also implements ways to support aging people, including legal and policy approaches, as I discuss below. However, the fact that professional aging-workers act “counter-demographically,” in that they accommodate the visual and mathematical tools of demography to their own purposes and implicitly or explicitly compare their own work to that done in other, more formal spheres, is of substantial interest for scholars exploring the range of implications of decreased fertility as well as for anthropological demography more generally.

My interpretation follows those anthropological demographers who have shown that representations of data are never “a straightforward depiction of some empirical reality” (Bledsoe 2010:108) but rather culturally shaped and produced objects, whose disparate uses can accomplish different ends (see, for example, Skrabut 2018, Scheper-Hughes 1997). One such end, as Susan Greenhalgh has shown, is that population problems are often represented as pre-existing, to be discovered and represented by science (2008:33). This process is shored up by the global development and expansion of aging as a concept, and crisis, alongside colonialism, development, and capitalism, as public health historian Kavita Sivaramakrishnan demonstrates (2018). The representational tools through which population aging is produced as a concern, such as numbers and graphs, can be analyzed as anthropological texts in that they “contain symbolically coded representations of complex communication” (Bledsoe 2010:104). To translate them, Caroline Bledsoe recommends plumbing “the layers of convention that have allowed us to imagine that particular ‘variables’ had any validity in the first place, and further led us to imagine it was legitimate to construct particular formulas to aggregate and compare them…” (2010:104).

As professional aging-workers engage in “counter-demography” – accommodating demographic formulas and representations to their own locally grounded narratives and understandings – they, too, enroll particular variables and tools in their own interpretations and efforts. This is well illustrated in the case of Sierra Leone, where Adia Benton demonstrates a productive tension that emerges from an overdrawn contrast between NGOs’ “vernacular accounting” – describing a problem and considering possible solutions – and states’ formal enumeration (2012:313). Vernacular accountants such as those described by Benton, and the counter-demographers I consider here, are thinking with, manipulating, and sometimes contesting the principles and methods that they encounter in more formal settings. And so, no doubt, are the denizens of those more formal settings themselves, though often in more muted ways. The concept of counter-demography is not meant to overdetermine a contrast between lay and formal settings, then, but rather to document how a wide range of professionals approach and participate in demographic discourse “sideways” (Thornton 2001) in order to fortify and give weight to the moral claims they make about social responsibility and old age.

In the remainder of this article, I first provide background about the ethnographic context, Peru in the early twenty-first century, and on my methods for gathering the ethnographic data I consider here. I then share two examples from fieldwork in south-central Peru in 2013 that illustrate how counter-demographic ideas about “population aging” were circulating in demographic and media settings, on one hand, and among “professional aging-workers,” namely, local people who work with and care for aging adults, on the other. In each section, I begin with an example of a form that is common to demographic representations, show how its more authorized usage is nonetheless nuanced and can be considered to have elements of counter-demography, and then expand by introducing a professional aging-worker who epitomizes counter-demography through their differential use of the same kind of form. The two professional aging-workers whose approaches I showcase are Alejandro, a Jesuit priest whose NGO supports rural older people in the countryside surrounding Ayacucho, and Rosario, a returned migrant whose years in Spain caring for the elderly gave her the needed experience to open a day care for older adults in the city of Ayacucho. I demonstrate how these professional aging-workers use and repurpose demographic tools, mobilizing them to talk about aging not as an existing problem discoverable and resolvable through demographic research (compare Greenhalgh 2008:33), but as a set of counter-demographic questions about day-to-day care, or how to age well (compare Zegarra Chiaporri 2019).² The questions they ask push ideas about population aging into temporal and spatial frameworks that exceed the future- and national-oriented scales that characterize many demographic takes.

Peruvian context and methods

Peru’s most recent census, in 2017, showed that the population had surpassed 31 million people (INEI 2018:13). This population size is comparable to Venezuela or Canada. The city of Ayacucho, in that census, held over 200,000 people (INEI 27); this is nearly double what it was when I first carried out fieldwork there at the turn of the millennium. Alongside continued population growth, two other important changes within the past century bear mentioning: urbanization and reduced fertility. Less than a quarter of Peruvians now live in rural areas (INEI 16); urbanization and rural-to-urban migration have rapidly transformed life in a country where 65% of residents lived in rural areas in the 1940s (Aramburú and Bustinza 2007:62). Urbanization often accompanies an emphasis on education and professionalization (Leinaweaver 2007).

In addition, the nation’s total fertility rate continued to fall, from 2007’s almost 3 per woman, to just under 2.5 in 2017 (INEI 2018:70). As the Peruvian demographers Carlos Aramburú and Maria Mendoza observe, this is a notable decrease from the 6.85 children per woman calculated in the 1960s, and has been accompanied by a decreasing mortality rate (2003:45). They conclude that “the Peruvian population is in the midst of its demographic transition” (46). They refer here to a theory within population studies – demographic transition “is an intertwining set of population-rooted social transformations that scholars argue unfold in fundamentally similar ways across a wide range of social and political settings” (Smith and Johnson-Hanks 2015:440), beginning with improvements in health and reduction in mortality, leading to population growth, out-migration, and urbanization; and ultimately, reduced fertility.

The “transition” does not alight everywhere equally, however. Aramburú and Mendoza also highlight the considerable disparity between fertility rates in urban and rural Peru; in 2000, rural women could be expected to have more than twice the number of children as urban women (5.06 versus 2.37, respectively; 2003:48-9). As they remark, “excessive population growth in under-developed areas equates to an increase in national inequality and poverty” (54). Tragically, a similar observation was used to justify a state-supported anti-natalist campaign that took place during Fujimori’s presidency in the 1990s, which targeted the fertility of poor, rural, indigenous women (Ewig 2006; Molina 2017). Forced sterilizations were surely a primary driver in the decrease in rural women’s fertility rates by nearly one-third during Fujimori’s second term (Aramburú 2014:84), though the increased costs of living and economic precarity associated with the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, and shifting aspirations for their children’s future, were other reasons that people desired fewer children than in the past (Battaglia and Pallarés 2020).³ It is the ghostly afterlife of this acute and rapid decrease in fertility that I analyze here: how an “aging population” was one of the specters that rose from the ashes of the draconian Fujimori era population policies, how the “aging population” is spatially assimilated to the more developed regions of the country while conceptually anchored to rural areas,⁴ and how the concept of “aging population” is mobilized through the expression of particular demographic tools, both formally and by “professional aging-workers.”

In this article, I draw on six months of qualitative research – two months in 2007 and four months in 2013 in the city of Ayacucho. Many of Ayacucho’s residents are bilingual in Spanish and Quechua, and many have rural origins and perhaps retain fields or a house in their communities of origin. The region is relatively poor in a country that had been perceived as economically strong until the ravages of COVID-19 revealed much of the economic success to be ephemeral. Ayacucho was also notably the center of the violent conflict in the 1980s and early 1990s between Shining Path and the Peruvian government, and is presently a key player in the country’s illicit drug economy.

Formal care for the aged is limited in Ayacucho; there is an institution in the city center, supported by the government and by donations and staffed by nuns, where “abandoned elderly” reside (Leinaweaver 2008a; see also Zegarra Chiaporri 2019)². But other forms of care for the aged also exist in the area, including targeted philanthropic care in the rural countryside and a new elder day-care center in the city. In addition, family demographers working in Latin America, Africa, and Asia point to “family strategies…which…supplement the insufficient social protection in these countries” (García Núñez 2012:9). Previously, I had conducted two years of ethnography on child fostering in Ayacucho (Leinaweaver 2007, 2008b, 2010b). One of the key motivations for child fostering was that an older person was lonely and wanted companionship and support: “grown children are deeply concerned with ensuring that their aging parents are cared for” (Leinaweaver 2010b:77). My subsequent research on aging in the region (Leinaweaver 2008a, 2009, 2010a, 2013) was sparked by that finding-wondering why older people were lonely, what that meant about how their expectations weren’t being met, and what social networks and capital could be marshaled to help support them.

The Peruvian state frames aging populations as vulnerable. This is illustrated by the government of Ollanta Humala (2011-2016) renaming the government department that tends to children and elderly “Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations.”⁵ Over the course of the past two decades, the Peruvian state – through its National Plan, laws, and non-contributory pension model – has engaged in efforts to try to support its growing aging population. New legal models and more widespread social programs have been introduced to attempt to formalize and extend forms of support for older people; notably, a 2006 law established family support as an older person’s right, stating that “the family has the duty to care for the physical, mental and emotional integrity of older adults” (Government of Peru 2006). More substantively, Peru’s Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion in 2011 instituted a cash transfer program for impoverished seniors, a noncontributory pension called Pension 65 (Olivera and Tournier 2016:1695; Vincent 2020; see Ballard 2013).⁶ (This is the program my goddaughter Olivia and her friend Meche described to me in the opening vignette.) These attempts to enshrine family and state support for the aged in Peru are accompanied by general economic precarity and uncertainty.

At a national level, then, Peru is characterized by decreased fertility coupled with legal and policy innovations in support of an “aging population.” The ethnographic context of a local setting, Ayacucho, where novel grassroots and entrepreneurial forms of support for the elderly co-exist with these national-level offerings, provides rich illustrations of counter-demography – as professional aging-workers engaged with population-level concepts to make sense of individual-level actions. In the discussion below, I assemble ethnographic and policy materials into two separate sections. In the first section, I focus on the population pyramid (a visualization of age cohorts in a particular social context). The pyramid is strongly associated with demography – it is a data visualization representing variety within a population. In the second section, I consider population statistics. Enumerative representations like statistics (see Benton 2012) are not limited to demographers, but are used across a number of social sciences. These two distinct examples show a range that illustrates the wider applicability of the concept of counter-demography, where individuals take up and creatively employ, across scales and political alignments, existing tools for engaging population-level issues.

1. Graphics of aging: The population pyramid

Population pyramids are graphic representations of a population’s “age structure,” which shows “age cohorts of different sizes relative to one another as they move through historical time” (Bengtson et al. 2003:6-7). Demographers explain that the shape itself can communicate rapidly about what the nation’s policy and social service needs might be, depending on whether there are a lot of young people or a lot of old people. The visually powerful pyramid, an equilateral triangle, is said to characterize most societies’ populations throughout history, with both high fertility and high mortality, so the user of this demographic form can visualize an age structure with many young people and only a few surviving older ones (Bengtson et al. 2003:7). An aging population is represented not by a pyramid but by something more like a column. (An example is found in McFalls 2007:19, and Latin America’s population pyramid is illustrated in Cotlear 2010:6. See also Figure 1, below.) Many other things – like the actual size of the population – are not depicted in a pyramid; the pyramid only illustrates the relative size of one age cohort (usually an age range of five years) compared to another at a particular moment in time. Placing two or more of these representations side by side, so that the different shapes can be easily compared, can have the effect of graphically highlighting change in a population’s composition.

Figure 1:

INEI’s triptych – “Pyramid of the Peruvian Population, 1950, 2015 and 2025”.

This is well illustrated by Susan Greenhalgh, whose work examines the development of population science in China, and specifically how this science brought about the one child policy. Greenhalgh depicts how the visualizations of demographic statistics are not neutral but rather reveal something tacit. For example, a graph that placed China alongside other more “modern” nations when comparing population size, suggested that the only thing that was preventing China from becoming modern was its visually dramatic population growth (Greenhalgh 2008:119). In the debate over how to address this growth, different groups presented different understandings of how the growth would look – social scientists’ hand-drawn graph with moderate proposals paled beside the mathematicians’ computerized graphic with dramatic sweeping arcs comparing untrammeled population growth and – with a projected one-child policy – a corresponding stabilization. Greenhalgh shows the importance of the graph itself as a technology, arguing for attention to the political goals that are achieved when graphs produce reality (216).

In a 2015 document called “The State of Peru’s Population,” issued by the country’s National Statistics Institute, the following image is provided (INEI 2015:6):

This set of three images is accompanied by text stating “the stagnation of the population growth in Peru is indicative of how changes in mortality and fertility have affected the size and the age structure of the population,” and suggests that these three pyramids show “a progressive and persistent growth of the population in adult ages, and a homogenization in the younger segments. So in 1950, for example, it was a pyramid (structure) with larger cohorts of younger children, while it narrowed toward the top, characteristically of a young country.” The institute explains the 2015 pyramid’s shape as resulting from the decreased mortality in younger ages, providing a sturdier-looking base in the cohorts from 0-19. And the 2025 projection “clearly shows a rectangular base, with similar segments up to age 34. This tendency of a transformation from a pyramid to a rectangle graphically demonstrates that our country finds itself in a moment of transition toward the demographic aging of its population.”⁷ By way of making the point, the document explains that in “1950, of every 100 Peruvians, 42 were under 15 years old, and only 6 were 60 or older (older adults). Currently, those younger than 15 represent 28% of the population and older adults are 10%. In 2025 those younger than 15 will be 24% of the population and older adults, 13%. So within 10 years, Peru’s older adult population will grow from 3 to 4.3 million, while young people will remain at 8 million.” The text sketches a significant shift in a country that only two decades earlier had instituted invasive population control policies.

This text is one of many that uses the phrase “demographic aging,” noting that Peru is no longer a “young country.” In an illustration of how counter-demography can appear in a wide range of sources, the authors of this text also allow some slippage between the idea of an aging population, and aging people, by mentioning increasing numbers of older adults. The term “population aging” frontloads the idea of aging, even when the changes in age structure can be due to decreased fertility or increased labor emigration instead of longer life expectancy (Crampton 2013:103). Yet when people are also living longer lives, which might be our initial referent when we imagine “aging,” such text and images together raise the idea that aging bodies populate an aging nation, fusing different scales of “aging.”

Curious about how such concepts were engaged with by professional aging-workers at smaller scales of analysis, I met with Alejandro, a Jesuit priest who has, for at least a decade, worked with aging rural populations in the Ayacucho region. His organization provides medical care, recreation like sports or music, meals, gatherings for celebration or prayer, and distribution of beds and bedclothes for older people.⁸ While others I knew in Ayacucho, like Olivia and Meche, had lots to say about caring for the aged like their own grandmothers, someone like Alejandro was in a unique position because he was directly implicated in providing this care at a larger, subnational scale. As we sipped tea one evening at a café in a plaza that had once been the courtyard of a Jesuit school, back before the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish possessions in the 1700s, I asked Alejandro about the significance of there being “more old people soon.” He dismissed it. He drew on a napkin for me an image I transcribe here - a conventional pyramid with just a little nipping in at the bottom (Figure 2). He later emailed me the document he had been visually quoting from – the “Plan for Older Adults” in the Ayacucho region (Ayacucho 2010:16; compare Gobierno del Peru 2013). The chart representing the Ayacucho region’s population pyramid is below (Figure 3).

Figure 2:

Representation of priest’s napkin drawing.

Figure 3.

“Population pyramid of the department of Ayacucho, by age and sex,” from the Regional plan for the older adult.

Here was a case of global demographic theory and concepts – the population pyramid – being deployed by Peruvian statistics experts, circulated in a policy plan in the provinces, and finally reproduced by a priest working in social justice. When Alejandro sketched the image, he engaged in counter-demography: that is, he used it to argue that population aging is not going to be a problem “until the ‘nipping in’ gets to the top,” which he disavowed any responsibility for, acknowledging that he wouldn’t be around to see that moment. Like the coffin-makers in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s discussion of “demography without numbers” (1997:204-207), Alejandro draws on his lived experience to counter demography and to suggest that the appearance of reality produced by this demographic representation is only partial. Alejandro’s response differs starkly from the “demographic alarmist” (Katz 1992) line that proposes that countries like Peru, with relatively low fertility and low mortality, “have limited time to prepare” (Denton 2011). A priest dealing with aging people and a demographer or policymaker reads the same chart and interprets it differently. His point was that what was most needed was day-to-day care and support of older people, not generalized concern about the future economic impact of population aging (compare Benton 2012). And this is just what his organization provides – from health care to beds. In fact, it was the beds that began the project – he told me that when they made visits to older parishioners and found some of them sleeping on sheepskins on the dirt floors of their adobe homes, they began distributing “sleep modules” that would remedy this perceived lack. For this professional aging-worker, the pyramid representation was not the point – it paradoxically served as counter-demographic evidence, illustrating that the “problem” represented in the pyramid was far from urgent, and that the real issue was where an older person might rest for the night. The significance of Alejandro’s counter-demographic work is in the way he uses, rather than dismisses, the demographic representations in his orbit, coupling them with attention to regional scale and everyday embodiment in order to come around to a justice-oriented conclusion. Alejandro emblematizes the productivity of countering demography.

2. Down for the count: Statistics and aging

Anthropologists who have studied the way numbers are used in everyday situations suggest that using “countable abstractions” helps to produce the sensation that the reality the abstractions attempt to represent, is “controllable” (Appadurai 1996:117; see also Appadurai 2006, Adams 2016). Appadurai’s analysis of the use of “number” as ideology in the colonial context suggests that numbers worked to translate or gloss a more complex local reality (1996:126). For statistics to function, Woolf observes, their audience must accept “the assertions of value-free neutrality” that underlie their operations (1989:588). Statistics are descriptive (Woolf 1989:591), a commonsensical observation that nonetheless requires stating, for it underscores how the apparent neutrality of statistical figures is produced. Demographic statistics are one subgenre of “countable abstractions” that have been widely analyzed. For example, Rebecca Howes-Mischel shows how the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals tackles its “problem of big numbers” by moving between scales, creating equivalences between enormous statistical figures (“zeroes”) and individual cases (“ones”) (2017:164; see also Newcomb 2010 on the vulgarities of failed, emotionally significant numbers).

Peru’s Vice Minister of Vulnerable Populations illustrates this use of countable abstractions, or raw numbers, in a 2013 speech quoted in the newspaper El Correo: “‘in 2020 there will be 2,452,229 senior citizens in Peru, and in 2050 6,451,884.’” These figures were used as “self-evident drivers” (Howes-Mischel 2017:168): as evidence that Peru should prepare policies that will permit the older segment of the population to “age with dignity and receive all the State’s care that is due to them… because even though Peru has experienced economic growth, human and social development has not kept pace” (El Correo 2013).

Here, a simple big number stood as justification for a policy reorientation. It is a demographic statement whose only point of comparison is an imagined (“forecasted”) future. We don’t get any clues about whether the rate of increase in the brute numbers is significantly different from historical rates; whether it shows a population change that is “better” or “worse” than that observed in other countries; or what it is that propels the increase in older population, since it could come from a variety of factors. Like the fusion of aging bodies and population aging that the population pyramid helped to illustrate in the previous section, the Vice Minister here engages in a form of counter-demography as well: leveraging the power of a simple number or image as a way of strategically sidestepping alternate forms of representation such as explicit comparison or historical analysis.

I contrast this relatively common use of “big numbers” with another kind of usage I encountered often among acquaintances in Ayacucho: the casual reference to “number” as an intensifying element of everyday conversation. Rosario’s use of numbers is a case in point, as I will show after I introduce her and her work. I first learned about Rosario’s center from a social worker friend who gave me a leaflet Rosario had printed to try to raise awareness of her services. The leaflet read “We attend older adults! No to solitude, no to Depression. We have more than 10 years of experience in Europe. Are you worried?? You don’t have anywhere to leave your parents or grandparents??? We have an appropriate, welcoming place.” I was intrigued by the reference to Europe, by the invocation of solitude, and by the novelty of this kind of product in the urban Andean context. Someone in Rosario’s position was well positioned to explicitly develop international points of comparison. Rosario, a nurse I met in Ayacucho, had lived in Spain for ten years and worked in a residence for the aged there before returning to Peru to attempt to startup a fledgling elderly day care. She, like Alejandro, was another example of a professional aging-worker, who not only worked to care for the aged, at a scale in between the national policy level and the individual level, but also thought actively about how they lived.

Peggy Levitt has written about social remittances: “the ideas, behaviors, and social capital that flow from receiving to sending communities…the tools with which ordinary individuals create global culture at the local level” (2001:11). When Peruvians migrate to the US, Spain, Italy, or Chile, they may encounter different ways of “doing age” (West and Fenstermaker 1995). In fact, some Peruvian migrants I spoke to in Spain were ready to judge the European model as negative in contrast to Peru, characterizing it as putting old people away in residences (see Bofill-Poch 2018). But many immigrants are also employed as home-care aides for older people, or in retirement homes. In those contexts they also learn different ways of thinking about aging, such as the globally-circulating ideologies of “active aging,” a concept promoting good quality of life, success, and productivity among older citizens. Jessica Robbins, who has written extensively about the way this concept is taken up and reworked in Poland, observes that “Initiatives promoting active aging often emerge in concert with other programs promoting neoliberal forms of politics and policies” (2020:2; see also Sivaramakrishnan 2018).

When I met her, Rosario lived at her workplace, which is located in a middle class residential development near Ayacucho’s university. When I arrived, she gave me a whirlwind tour of the living room (where two older women were sitting quietly on a sofa in front of a bookshelf full of children’s toys), a kitchen where Rosario was cooking their lunch, behind that a garden, inside again a half bathroom, and finally a small single bed in a bedroom which was hers and an office with dining chairs, a reclining dentist chair and a desk.

As we discussed her work that day and in subsequent conversations, I noticed how Rosario based her analyses on what she learned during her time overseas. She offered me some context, seasoning it liberally with “number” (Appadurai 1996). As she explained,

“About Spain, I laugh because in 20 years there won’t be anyone left to go get a cup of water for an old person. 90 percent of Spain will be old…By contrast, in Peru, of 29 million Peruvians, 10 percent are elderly. And the life expectancy has really changed, it used to be that Peruvians expected to live until their 60s, now it’s 90, 95, 98. You want those extra years to be good, to be the best, which is why you want to make sure there are services to get the old person’s mental and physical state exercised, to help slow down the aging.”

In this quote, Rosario uses numbers-everything from raw population counts to percentages to actual ages. She counters demography, wielding spectacularly large numbers not grounded in official data in order to fuse population aging, future projections, and life expectancy as components of a picture in which collaborative aging can be positive. Like Alejandro, the Jesuit priest, Rosario emphasized health, comfort, and social activity for older people; she explained that “Being sad and alone makes aging happen faster.” She had learned a set of physical exercises in her work in Spain, which she imported unchanged to Ayacucho: “Old is old whether you are in Peru or China,” she explained.⁹

Rosario contrasted her services not only with what she saw in Spain, but with the residence in Ayacucho, run by nuns, that serves the “abandoned elderly” (Leinaweaver 2008a, 2009, 2010a). As she explained, “it’s considered very bad to send your parent there. No one does it, and if they do, people talk.” The negative connotations of placing a kinsperson in that particular institution were clear; elsewhere I’ve written of one of my neighbors in Ayacucho, Deysi, who told me that the people in that residence had failed to ensure their children received a good education – she theorized that children whose parents had met their implicit commitment to set their children on a path to a professional career would respond with gratitude by arranging a preferable form of in-home care (Leinaweaver 2013:554, see also Leinaweaver 2010b:78).¹⁰ Rosario was also critical of the Pension 65 cash transfer program; she called it a palliative, not solving the root cultural problem. “What’s really needed is to change our habits, take them into consideration more, not bury them alive. In China they are like saints, they are the ones who resolve problems. Not in Europe. There, they are detached from the home; there are children who barely know their grandparents because the grandparents have been set aside.” Though Rosario was familiar with Europe from her own years working there, her reference to China more likely drew on a national stereotype, the widely held sense that filial piety predominates in Chinese family relations. The significance of Rosario’s counter-demographic work is in how she draws upon demographic forms as comparison points: by aligning them with evidence and hearsay she drew from international contexts, she too, like Alejandro, moved explicitly toward a moral, non-neutral, conclusion. As this professional aging-worker used demographic representations to evaluate what older people needed and were not receiving, she was countering demography.

Conclusion

In this article, I have considered a practice I call counter-demography: the informal, critical reappropriation of formal population tools and concepts by professional aging-workers, here a priest committed to social justice for older people, and a returned migrant trying to start up a business caring for older people. There were elements of counter-demography in the official, governmental sources I drew from – even as actors more evidently aligned with population resources used formal population tools like the pyramid and quantitative measurements, they pushed the tools in particular directions. But they are limited in doing so by the limits of state agendas and interests regarding aging people.

Counter-demographic reasoning is more dramatically evident in the labor of the professional aging-workers I described, whose conditions of work and grounded understandings of moral responsibility freed them to wield demographic concepts more expansively. Their usage of population tools reveals an intense focus on a particular kind of evidence drawn from the here and now. In other words, spatially and temporally, Alejandro and Rosario emphasize what is immediately before them. Their reappropriation of demographic tools appears to facilitate a powerful form of witnessing linked to their care for aging people in Ayacucho.

Demographic analyses, imagery, and language circulate worldwide and are deployed in Latin America as elsewhere in the world to convey certainty, objectivity, and reason for concern (Sivaramakrishnan 2018). In both temporal and spatial terms, by omitting international or historical points of comparison and pointing toward a predictive future, the formal use of population tools can facilitate an emphasis on the “relative aging” of a national population that is still in global terms quite young, and provides support for future-oriented exhortations that Peru must prepare for a forthcoming challenge and continue on a course of development and progress.

Meanwhile, the counter-demographic use of population tools by local professionals working with older individuals offers a substantially more nuanced narrative. Population aging appears as a problem so distant that it does not need to displace the current challenges of aging bodies, as Alejandro had told me. Here we can see a contrast in terms of the temporality employed in each framing: from the predictive, future-oriented work done in formal demography which is oriented toward a mode of alert or warning, to the present-oriented focus of embodied care. This is not to say that either Alejandro or Rosario do not expect old people to make up a greater proportion of the Peruvian population in the years ahead – it is to say that their work demands they counter demography by resisting its future orientation at what feels to them, accurately or not, like the cost of a present-day focus on care.

The spatial element of Alejandro’s and Rosario’s concerns were also interesting in their scale – on one hand they were both fiercely locally oriented, as opposed to scaled up to the national level. But as well, Rosario made explicit what others (including the examples of media discussions that I included above) may leave implicit, that is, a sense of comparison between Peru and other places. As Rosario had explained to me, perhaps in comparison to super-old countries like Spain, Peru has a built-in advantage and can build on that advantage by slowing physical aging even further. Her observations reminded me that the absence of comparison can be read as, potentially, a sign of implicit comparison, through spuriously linking particular forms of demographic behavior to international ideals of progress (Thornton 2001).

Through their conceptual focus on time and space, both the priest and the nurse drew on the demographic tools used to operationalize the formulations of concern, doing so in order to emphasize old people’s bodily experiences and to pair that emphasis with a relative optimism at the population level.¹¹ As counter-demographers, they co-opt the imprimatur of authority that coheres to demographic tools and terms in order to strengthen the moral claims they make about aging and responsibility. To me, their counter-demographic interpretations matched the observations of anthropologists cross culturally, as Elana Buch summarizes in her insightful review: “The aging body figures critically in discussions of care in later life, as increases in debility that typically accompany advanced age signal older adults’ needs for direct care” (2015:281).

Many anthropologists who work with and take seriously demographic scholarship are mindful too of the analysis of Foucault, who in his writings on governmentality observed that the tactics required to know a population, at a macro level, reflect a fundamental transformation of the ends of government itself (1978 [2001]; see also Woolf 1989). The contrast between a professional, everyday, or vernacular attention to bodily experiences, and the population-level enumeration of relative aging signaled by Foucault, echoes Asad’s conclusion that “a mode of knowledge which grew out of counting large numbers of human beings living in variable conditions…had to be marginal in a discipline that regarded itself primarily as interpretative rather than practical” (1994:75). Smith and Johnson-Hanks, too, remark that “macro-demographic trends…often tend to be overlooked by…anthropologists who either find such large-scale processes beyond the scope of our methodological toolkit or are repelled by the similarities of demographic transition narratives to a linear, teleological modernization story” (2015:441). Ultimately, anthropological demographers can greatly benefit from incorporating into our analyses the demographic, social, and political consequences of counter-demographic conclusions, such as those that professional aging-workers come to through using population tools.