Aaron Hames
Aaron Hames is an ethnographer. He received is PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. His dissertation, titled “Finding Peace: Aging, Solidarity, and Min-Iren,” examines elderly life and cooperative medical institutions in Japan. He also received an MA in Regional Studies—East Asia from Harvard University, focusing on classical Japanese poetry and translation. His work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology and Anthropology and Humanism.
At HKU, Aaron will complete his first book manuscript, tentatively titled A Book of Life. This ethnography explores the relationship between the elderly and Min-Iren, a leftist medical federation in Japan.Tracing a path of aging and decline, it shows how some of Japan’s older residents
shape cooperative clinics and hospitals not only to provide medical cooperative clinics and hospitals not only to provide medical care attuned to their needs, but also to create venues for social life, hobbies, community building, and political activism. Ethnographic in focus, the manuscript places narratives of life within the context of seasons, working-class neighborhoods, rituals, and waves of insects.
Aaron’s next project will be a comparative study of elderly loneliness in Hong Kong and Tokyo. This project will consider the relationships people forge with each other as well as with non-human entities, including family, paid caregivers, pets, and collections of objects. Through a focus on loneliness and attempts at its relief, this study will provide comparisons on conceptions of the self and dependence.
Publications
ヘイムス アーロン. 2022. “医療人類学からみた医療機関と共同組織.” 保健の科学, no. 64 (March): 176–80.
Hames, Aaron. 2021. “The Energetic Brain Club in Life and Death.” Anthropology and Humanism 46 (1): 171–86.
Hames, Aaron. 2020. “Ageing and the Case of Democratic Medicine in Japan.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology 35 (1): 1–33.