ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the concept and practice of the old-age home as a key institution constituting transnational aging, with a focus on the burgeoning role of the old-age home in contemporary India. It focuses on how residents, kin, and proprietors within India are creating unique cultural versions of the traveling institution of the modern old-age home. It then argues that the old-age home as a traveling institution plays an important role in constituting aging itself in a transnational way. Cultural and economic factors involving both sending and receiving nations, and the interplay between national and transnational forces, come together to create the historically situated institution of the old-age home in unique contexts. In the West, old-age homes that were made in the 1880s under specific cultural-historical contexts have been remade in the 2000s to instantiate new values, such as the independent living, active aging, and prolongation of midlife scripts promoted in US retirement communities today.
