The nursing home has become a paramount site for the care and custody of
old people, but it also affects how we think and talk about the ageing body.
In this article, narrative and ethnographic material drawn from a variety of
care-related settings is used to illustrate how and where the nursing home
serves as a discursive anchor for embodiment. Circumstantial, local cultural,
and organisational mediations are considered, featuring institutionalisation to
be as much a descriptive phenomenon, as it is a residential relocation.
