ABSTRACT
Drawing on fieldwork with 20 older migrants, who self-defined as Turkish, this chapter highlights emotions and caring relations in diasporic contexts. The argument focuses on first-generation Turkish migrants’ experience of being away from home (gurbet), their longing (gurbetlik) and their ideals of care in the diaspora. Having once lost caring relations, ageing in the diaspora may nourish and reinforce a quest for a diasporic community at older ages. This quest can be considered as one response to the unknown future and the fear of solitude, abandonment and isolation in old age, reinvigorated in the diaspora. Ageing in the diaspora coincides with working out different possibilities of connectivity, care needs and caring relations.
