six - The cultures of ageing and later life

Summary

In the preceding chapters we have looked at what we have termed the bioscapes and the financescapes of ageing and later life. This chapter explores the ways in which belonging and identity are produced and reproduced along what can be called the ethnoscapes of ageing and later life. Appadurai (1996) defines the ethnoscape as ‘the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other moving groups’. As noted in Chapter Two, a key issue in both cultural and critical gerontology has been the creation of (new) identities in later life. Writers from both perspectives recognise that the earlier, modernist nation state based sources of identity for later life have been undermined and challenged (Wilson 1997, Phillipson 1998, Gilleard and Higgs 2000, Powell and Longino 2002). For Appadurai (1996) two of the key challenges to the nation state are the global mobility of peoples and of signs. These challenges raise a number of questions for social gerontology. What do the ethnoscapes of later life look like? To what extent are older people part of these new mobilities, in terms of travel and migration? Has the third age become a free floating global signifier, or do national or regional differences regarding identity and mobility continue to construct old age?

The previous two chapters have demonstrated that the key coordinates that have traditionally been used to identify old age, such as health and retirement, have become relatively unstable and are now much more fluid than they once were. Older people can no longer be regarded as uniformly ill, disabled or poor. The institutional arrangements that produced and were reproduced by these earlier experiences of ageing have themselves been transformed. Welfare systems, pensions in particular, have become less stable as they respond to demographic and cultural changes and as they themselves become part of the shift to late modernity. This suggests that there are number of new temporal vistas along which ageing occurs. These have shifted from the stable, linear trajectories of classical or high modernity to the more fluid reversible and conditional temporalities of late, reflexive or second modernity.