Biography
My name is Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori and I am a British Academy International Fellow in the department of Anthropology. I am a Peruvian Medical Anthropologist who holds a BA in Hispanic Literature from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, a Master in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and a Master and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, USA. My research interests lie at the intersection of economies of care, old age, intimacy and affect theory, social abandonment, death, marginalized communities, and Latin American studies.
Research
Throughout my work, I seek to examine the lives and subjective experiences of one of the most invisible, unmapped, and understudied populations of Peruvian society: urban older people in Peru’s capital, Lima. As in the Global North, in the Global South population aging is poised to become one of the most significant social transformations of the twenty-first century, one the world’s most pressing challenges of our times. COVID-19 showed us that the inequities of neoliberal globalism produce a differential distribution of social risk that renders vulnerable those who are aging without family support and financial security. This is a reality, especially in countries with disrupted and poor medical infrastructures like Peru. In Peru, people are living longer than they had, but under more precarious conditions. Weak public policies, deficient distribution of national budgets, institutional corruption, and broken state institutions threaten the provision of adequate care to older adults. As a result, many people in the region are aging amidst conditions of loneliness, poverty, and social destitution. Interweaving Latin American studies, population aging, and medical anthropology, I focus on a topic of global magnitude in a region of the world where research on the matter is scant and rather urgent.
Grounded in thirty months of rigorous ethnographic fieldwork at dilapidated long-term care institutions for older adults in Lima, my book-in-preparation, Growing Old in the Margins, demonstrates that people above 60, who lack family connections and economic means to support themselves, once in these facilities, are often dehumanized by the precarious care they are provided with from staff due to personnel shortage, budget cuts and lack of resources. As an ethnographer of marginalized communities, I take decrepit long-term care facilities in Peru as an opportunity to consider how citizenship and human rights, for many older adults, are at risk today. These places often offer unreliable and neglectful care that trespasses residents’ bodies and emotional selves. My fieldwork at these institutions focuses on exploring the bioethical threats older adults must face when both their families and the Peruvian state have turned their backs on them.
Publications
Peer-reviewed articles
Under review. 2025. “Amarrados: How Precariousness Structures Inconsistent Forms of Care in a Long-Term Care Facility in Lima, Peru. Ageing and Society.
2024 “Caring for Our Interlocutors on the Threshold of Life and Death.” The Lancet Respiratory Medicine 13 (1): 18-20. Wackley Prize, Finalist.
2024 “Vulnerable Lives, Irrelevant Deaths? Dying Alone and Receiving Flawed Care While Growing Old Institutionalized in Lima, Peru”. Medical Anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 43 (6): 482-494.
2022 “Remaining, Vital Acts and Possibility: The Exercise of ‘Sustaining Oneself’ in a Residential Care Center for the Elderly in Lima, Peru”. Anthropology and Humanism 47 (2): 297-311
2021 “Vejeces latinoamericanas y el impacto del COVID-19 en personas adultas mayores”. Anthropologica 39 (47): 5-27 (co-authorship with Gabriela Ramos)
2021 “Biopolitically (Un)caring: Sustaining Bodies and Shaping Care in Precarious Environments” for the Special Issue on Dependencia, Envejecimiento y Cuidados, edited by Montserrat Soronellas and Dolors Comas d’Argemir. Arxiu d’ Etnografia de Catalunya. Awarded Honorable Mention, José María Arguedas Prize, Latin American Studies Association.
2019 “Growing Old in the Margins in Lima, Peru”. Anthropology and Aging: Journal of the Association for Anthropology and Gerontology 40 (2): 60-66.
2011 “So as not to Forget: Storytelling, Agency, the Public Sphere and Reconciliation in Peruvian Testimonies of Political Violence”. CULT/URE: The Graduate Journal of Harvard Divinity School. Spring (6).
Chapters in Edited Volumes
Forthcoming and accepted. 2024. “Old Age, Affection, and the Right to Care in the Time of COVID-19.” In The Age of COVID-19. Edited by Zula Erdenedagva, Narrelle Warren, Celeste Pang and Rosi Aryal. Berghahn Books.
Forthcoming and accepted. 2024. “Virginia’s Story: How the COVID-19 Crisis Can Help Us Think About Older Adults Who Live in Perennial Abandonment.” In The Age of COVID-19. Edited by Zula Erdenedagva, Narrelle Warren, Celeste Pang and Rosi Aryal. Berghahn Books.
Forthcoming and accepted. 2026. “God, Old Age, and Underdevelopment: Lived Religion in a Precarious Long-Term Care Facility for Older Adults in Lima, Peru.” In The Routledge Handbook of Anthropological and Development Studies Approaches to Aging.
2024 “Making Vulnerable: The Exposure to Harm of Institutionalized Older Adults in Lima, Peru”. In Challenging Stories: Rethinking Health in the Spaces between Data and Narrative. Edited by Virginia Tech Publishing and The National Endowment for the Humanities. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/c4f288f6-5dc7-43bc-b0e2-9de968940a04/content
2022 “Providing Care in Precarious Settings: The Messiness of a Contested Practice” for the Special Issue Shaping Aging. Social Transformations and Enduring Meanings, edited by Adriana Teodorescu. Routledge
Public scholarship and Op-Eds
Forthcoming and accepted. 2024. “Physical Restraint in Long-Term Care Facilities for Older Adults in Lima, Peru”. Anthropology News.
2024 “Introduction: Aging Globally: Challenges and Possibilities of Growing Old in an Unsettling Era.” American Ethnologist website, 8 August. https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/aging-globally/aging-globally-challenges-and-possibilities-of-growing-old-in-an-unsettling-eraby-magdalena-zegarra-chiappori/
2024 “On Writing and Becoming an Anthropologist: Mistakes, Shifting Career Paths, Anthropological Praxis, and Academic Precarity”. American Ethnologist website, July 9. https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/essays/on-writing-and-bec...
2024 “What It’s Like To Grow Old in the Margins, Lima, Peru”. Sapiens website, March 13. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/elder-care-peru-margins/
2024 “I would rather die than to live in this institution”, NACLA website, February 21. https://nacla.org/i-would-rather-die-live-institution
2023 “Introduction: A Sign of Our Times: Caring in an Unsettling World,” with Salwa Tareen. American Ethnologist website, August 8.
https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/uncaring-worl...
2022 “Introduction: Taking Note: Complexities and Ambiguities in Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” with Verónica Sousa. American Ethnologist website, August 26.
https://americanethnologist.org/features/collections/taking-note-complex...
2022 “Intimate Precarities”. American Ethnologist website, July 13. https://americanethnologist.org/features/reflections/intimate-precarities-growing-old-in-lima-peru. Awarded President’s Award for Student Scholarship, Society for Humanistic Anthropology, American Anthropological Association.
2021 “Surviving COVID-19 in Peru”. Blog of The Association for Anthropology, Gerontology and the Life Course (also published in Somatosphere), August 8. http://anthropologyandgerontology.com/surviving-covid-19-in-peru/
2021 “On Possibility: Old Age and What is Left When Living in Hell”. American Ethnologist website, 19 January. https://americanethnologist.org/features/reflections/on-possibility-old-...
2020 “Hacia una cultura de cuidado”. The Sociological Review, May 15. https://www.solidarityandcare.org/stories/essays/hacia-una-cultura-del-cuidado-towards-a-culture-of-care
2020 “Virginia’s Story: How the COVID-19 Crisis Can Help Us Think About Older Adults that Live in Perennial Abandonment”. Somatosphere, May 2. http://somatosphere.net/2020/virginias-story-how-the-covid-19-crisis-can-help-us-think-about-older-adults-who-live-in-perennial-abandonment.html/
2020 “Vejez, afectos y derecho al cuidado”. Noticias Ser, Abril 8. http://www.noticiasser.pe/opinion/vejez-afectos-y-derecho-al-cuidado
2019 “Pensando en pequeños símbolos: reflexiones en torno al trabajo de campo en un albergue para ancianos en Peru”. Revista Qmayor, March 17. https://www.qmayor.com/actualidad/sujeciones-etica/
