Aging in Cultural Context and as Narrative Process: Conceptual Foundations of the Anthropology of Aging as Reflected in the Works of Margaret Clark and Sharon Kaufman (original) (raw)
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Permanent Personhood or Meaningful Decline? Toward a Critical Anthropology of Successful Aging
The current North American successful aging movement offers a particular normative model of how to age well, one tied to specific notions of individualist personhood especially valued in North America emphasizing independence, productivity, self-maintenance, and the individual self as project. This successful aging paradigm, with its various incarnations as active, healthy and productive aging, has received little scrutiny as to its cultural assumptions. Drawing on fieldwork data with elders from both India and the United States, this article offers an analysis of cultural assumptions underlying the North American successful aging paradigm as represented in prevailing popular and scientific discourse on how to age well. Four key themes in this public successful aging discourse are examined: individual agency and control; maintaining productive activity; the value of independence and importance of avoiding dependence; and permanent personhood, a vision of the ideal person as not really aging at all in late life, but rather maintaining the self of one's earlier years. Although the majority of the (Boston-area, well-educated, financially privileged) US elders making up this study, and some of the most cosmopolitan Indians, embrace and are inspired by the ideals of the successful aging movement, others critique the prevailing successful aging model for insufficiently incorporating attention to and acceptance of the human realities of mortality and decline. Ultimately, the article argues that the vision offered by the dominant successful aging paradigm is not only a particular cultural and biopolitical model but, despite its inspirational elements, in some ways a counterproductive one. Successful aging discourse might do well to come to better terms with conditions of human transience and decline, so that not all situations of dependence, debility and even mortality in late life will be viewed and experienced as "failures" in living well.
The narrative complexity of successful ageing
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 2009
Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to argue for an archaeological expedition of sorts, to search for and to uncover a host of stories which might assist us in piecing together a framework worth dedicating our future lives to understanding ageing. Design/methodology/approach-This is a theoretical paper on ageing. Findings-An individual's experience of ageing is integrally bound to questions of cultureparticularly the systems of meaning within culture-and context. Just as there is not ''one true story of aging'', so the paper suggests that we must have multiple narratives to assist us in building our own models of successful ageing. Originality/value-Narratives of successful ageing, like all narratives, are never told in a vacuum. Rather, there must be those who are able to hear them, often stretching themselves beyond their own experiences, even beyond their own cultural frameworks. This has strong implications for researchers of successful ageing: together, we must try to meet the challenge of listening to diversity.
The Challenge of Cultural Gerontology
The Gerontologist, 2014
Over the last decade, Cultural Gerontology has emerged as one of the most vibrant elements of writing about age (Twigg, J., & Martin, W. (Eds.) (2015). The Routledge handbook of cultural gerontology. London: Routledge). Reflecting the wider Cultural Turn, it has expanded the field of gerontology beyond all recognition. No longer confined to frailty, or the dominance of medical and social welfare perspectives, cultural gerontology addresses the nature and experience of later years in the widest sense. In this review, we will explore how the Cultural Turn, which occurred across the social sciences and humanities in the late 20th century, came to influence age studies. We will analyze the impulses that led to the emergence of the field and the forces that have inhibited or delayed its development. We will explore how cultural gerontology has recast aging studies, widening its theoretical and substantive scope, taking it into new territory intellectually and politically, presenting this in terms of 4 broad themes that characterize the work: subjectivity and identity; the body and embodiment; representation and the visual; and time and space. Finally, we will briefly address whether there are problems in the approach.
2022
The professional fields of gerontology and geriatrics rely on a cultural construct that growing “old” signals a shift from adult independence to child-like dependence, coupled with the loss of “productive” social roles. They have created a professional landscape of frail, dependent “others” who require intervention once reaching threshold ages, such as 60 or 65. In the gerontological imagination, older adults serve as an embodiment of irrevocable decline into disability, disease, frailty, and death. Profit off this landscape comes through grant proposals, training programs, and service provision. Population aging statistics are associated with natural disaster (e.g. silver tsnunami), warning of threat to informal (family) and public (social welfare) systems). The perceptions, creative adaptations, and agency of people as they age past mature adulthood are lost in the presumption that the gerontological role is to assess, intervene, and problem-solve – and rescue. Prolonged ethnographic fieldwork, however, contributes to decolonization of this discourse and of expert intervention by unsettling ethnocentric presumptions of gerontological constructs, documenting cross cultural variation in how people navigate aging as part of lived experience, and privileging lived expertise over professional assessment. This paper contributes to decolonizing gerontology through presenting from an ongoing research study in a Midwestern Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC), which began in December, 2020. This is an intersectional study comparing gerontological and local constructions of “getting old,” which one resident defined as a boundary crossed, “when you are no longer the person you prepared yourself to be.” The CCRC is designed like a rural college campus, and is divided into “independent living” (average age is 81) and “assisted living” (average age is 88). Each month, on average, 1-4 people move in and 1-4 people move out (usually through death). Most residents identify as white, Christian, heterosexual, cisgender, and affluent. While intersectionality theory can importantly examine the intersection of oppressed identities (Crenshaw 1989), this study questions how people who identify as highly privileged confront the stigmatized losses and vulnerabilities of aging within a highly gendered and heteronormative context. As an “inside-out” (Riles, 2000) study, this 16-month ethnographic field project documents variations in experience of disabilities, disease, and decline that, in turn, bring varied responses to “getting old” as a personal and community-wide problem. Getting “outside” gerontological constructs of aging requires first engaging residents in their own constructions, and then inviting them to compare their experience with their encounters with gerontological and geriatric professionals. Another inside-out dimension in this research is to share emergent findings and invite dialogue with residents. This process has provided a culturally resonant way to mutually confront ageism and ableism, and inspired residents to pursue their own interventions of mutual support. This paper uses study results to argue how gerontology can be addressed as a colonizing enterprise and how anthropological research can provide an unsettling response. It also describes a practical outcome, which has been resident driven intervention to break their silence of internalized ageism and ableism despite socialization to keep such troubles private.
Special Issue. Ageing as a Unique Experience.
2023
Ageing is a diverse and multifaceted experience that is unique to each person. The process of ageing is lived differently according to each individual’s socio-cultural, historical, religious, and political context, among other significant factors. However, the stereotype of homogeneity is still one of the strongest aspects related to later life. This Special Issue covers manuscripts of original research that critically examine the experience of old age and the process of growing older from different perspectives that range from social sciences to humanities and include social gerontology, cultural and literary gerontology, environmental gerontology, gerotechnological studies, social anthropology, and gender studies. The published articles explore and deepen our knowledge on body politics, sexuality, active and healthy ageing, space and place, age-friendly politics, human-robot interaction, media environments, digitalisation, the fourth age, ageism, narrative inquiry, creative writing, retirement management, and policy discourses among other topics. They collect arguments that show the variables and uniqueness of later life, and expand on the current theoretical frameworks in the field of age studies and beyond. The overall aim of this Special Issue is to broaden the gerontological scholarship and develop critical thought of old age and the life course beyond the merely biological processes of growing older and their sociocultural constructs. This Special Issue can be of interest to scholars, practitioners, stakeholders, and individuals concerned with the current dynamics of later life as well as the futures of ageing.
The narrative quest in qualitative gerontology
Journal of Aging Studies, 1989
popular culture-contemporary films, the themes are then traced in gerontological literuture. To crystallize the epistemological and uxiological problems a purticular paradigm, the narrative of secular redemption, is highlighted. The article uims to contribute to a critical, self-reflective literature exploring philosophical dimensions of gerontology.
Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course
Aging and the Life Course:Global Transformations," Jay Sokolovsky Series Editor, 2013
"“The life course” as the socially and culturally organized progression of individuals through time, has long been an implicit conceptual framework for understanding cultural change. This volume positions the human life course at the center of anthropological inquiry, tracing the complexities of social relationships and cultural identities back to fundamental questions of what it means to grow up and grow older. The contributors represent a range of recent approaches to the study of the life course in anthropology, including new perspectives on changing identities over the lifespan, inter-generational dynamics, the uses of memory and narrative, the experience of body, and the complex relationships between politics, economics, and age. Together, they attempt to capture the diverse ways notions of the life course are constructed and manipulated to create meaning and transform social relationships. Separately, they look at the life course in India, Mexico, Japan, Argentina, the E.U., and other locales, as well as locations across the United States from the factory to the clinic. In ethnographically rich portraits of real people and their daily lives (the victories and the struggles), the contributors examine a wide range of human experience, from sexuality to suffering, labor to spirituality. Across these portraits we see transition and transformation: lives and people changing, and with the passage of time the creation of new obstacles, opportunities, perspectives, vocations, and identities. Contributors include: Mary Catherine Bateson, Lindsey Martin, Emily Wentzell, Jeanne Shea, Jessica Robbins, Frances Norwood, Jane Guyer and Kabiru Salami, Sarah Lamb, Michelle Gamburd, Diana Brown, Marta Rodriguez-Galan, Caitrin Lynch and Jason Danely. Afterword by Jennifer Cole"