Joshua Hotaka Roth — Life Lines: art, memory, relationship
An ethnographic exploration of elder care as a creative and relational process, drawn from the author's experience with his aging father.
Why we picked this
Roth brings an anthropologist's lens to his own family's experience of aging and caregiving. The result is a book that treats elder care not as a burden to be managed but as a deeply creative act.
Joshua Hotaka Roth’s Life Lines approaches elder care from an unexpected angle: as an ethnographer studying his own family. Drawing on his experience caring for his aging father, Roth examines how art, memory, and relationship intertwine in the daily work of caregiving, finding creative dimensions in what is too often framed as mere obligation.
In conversation with Mark Auslander, Roth discusses how the tools of anthropology — close observation, cultural context, attention to ritual — can transform our understanding of one of life’s most universal experiences.
Free event at Politics and Prose, Connecticut Avenue.