seven - Politics, place and ageing

Summary

In this chapter we explore the spatiality of Appadurai's final ‘scape’, that of the ideoscape. This is important because any understanding of the relationship between globalisation and ageing needs also to address the political dimensions that are specific to each polity. Topics such as the rise of the ‘grey planet’ or the restructuring of politics around generational inequity or conflict need to be seen as having their own specificity and context rather than being products of a relatively unreflexive approach to globalisation where old age is treated as a unitary category producing either greater dependency or negative societal outcomes. The concept of the ideoscape therefore represents how the nation state's power is one form of global flow and refers to both prevailing dominant discourses operating within the nation as well as existing and emergent counter-discourses that seek to challenge or question that status quo. Appadurai (1996: 36 emphasis in original) defines ideoscapes as:

concatenations of images, … [which] are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it. These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment world view, which consists of a chain of ideas, terms and images including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation and the master term democracy.

However, they are not just simple extensions of a hegemonic capitalism. As he points out contemporary ideoscapes are much more complicated. Consequently,

the diaspora of these terms and images across the world, especially since the nineteenth century, has loosened the internal coherence that held them together in a Euro-American master narrative and provided instead a loosely structured syncopation of politics, in which different nation states, as part of their evolution, have organised their political cultures around different keywords. (Appadurai, 1996: 36)

Moreover, and of particular importance for our argument, he believes that these ideoscapes operate across a number of ‘scalar dynamics’ in which actors operating at the national and local levels risk, and resist, being absorbed in the ‘imagined communities’ of higher scales.

Appadurai's image of actors coming together to promote a core set of beliefs over those of other actors or groups resonates with the idea of an ‘epistemic community’.