ABSTRACT
Living and Dying at Murray Manor (Gubrium [1975]1997) is the first booklength ethnography of a nursing home. It is the touchstone for similar contributions dealing with what came to be called the “culture of long-term care” (Henderson & Vesperi 1995). In revisiting the Murray Manor project, I’ll describe how the research began, especially how I thought about the nursing home experience before the fieldwork started, and what led me to conceptualize how the organization of life and work in the nursing home was ethnographically accessible. In the spirit of this collection, I focus on the developing analytic framework.
While many memories of the Murray Manor fieldwork are personal and I’ll touch on this, it is the evolution of a way of thinking about institutional life that eventually made the research and the book what they became. What will be apparent in my account is the increasing realization of the shortcomings of preconceived categories in coming to grips with the complexity of everyday life. Murray Manor became the site of ethnographic fieldwork and formed my ethnographic skills, as much from a shift in analytic perspective, as from a developing interest in the aging experience.
