Molly George’s book Aging in a Changing World is a clearly written case study that queries a pervasive yet questionable narrative circulating in Global North media and politics that older adults are generally more intolerant of new immigrants to their communities. Through field research in two cities in New Zealand, Auckland and Dunedin, George examines non-migrating, mostly older white adults’ perspectives, showing how their experiences of aging-in-place can partly counter this narrative and are also central to contemporary urban multiculturalism.
‘Chapter 1: Aging in times of great change’ situates this theory in political discourse, citing the Brexit vote in the UK and anti-immigration rhetoric among older adults in the US. It reviews changing population demographics in New Zealand and the US and provides an overview of George’s participant observation and interview research methods. She includes a comprehensive list of coded emergent themes that structure her findings on aging: attitudes towards immigrants; experiences and ideas of ‘contact’; historical and social changes; and cultural norms specific to the country. George explains the context for her primary participants’ self-identification as ‘older New Zealanders’ (mostly descendants of white British settlers, locally called Pākehā) and her positionality as a US-born immigrant married to a New Zealander.
‘Chapter 2: Global movement, everyday multiculturalism, and aging’ situates participants’ ageing in place within anthropological and sociological research and approaches to the lifecourse, successful ageing and adaptability amid social change. ‘Chapter 3: Constructing the field and recruiting the urban stranger’ describes George’s methodology and research sites frequented such as marketplaces and meeting halls. She also explains how urban research presents challenges to participant sampling and defining the field. For example, she first aimed for a proportional sample that reflected cities’ demographics, but faced fleeting, ambiguous, non-intimate encounters that did not afford direct questioning of participants’ ethnic identities. This led her to reconceptualise her approach to participant identification, rather than change recruitment strategy, and to advocate for researchers embodying a respectfully distant ‘cosmopolitan politesse’ (p. 44). Ultimately, her participant sample comprised mostly older New Zealanders and a few female immigrants whom she also met in these public research sites.
‘Chapter 4: “Then and now”: narratives of change’ presents older adults’ perceptions of increasing diversity that George argues correspond to immigration policy historically: from white Dutch immigrants after World War II to restrictive ‘pepper-potting’ of Asian and Pacific Islander immigrant families to prevent their enclaving, and finally to asylum-seeking-based policies after 1987. ‘Chapter 5: Older New Zealanders’ immigration-related concerns’ enumerates critical perceptions of immigration’s impacts: increased scams; drug and petty crime and competition for jobs; strained health-care systems; environmental abuse; and threats to social cohesion and the country’s presumed bicultural character of Pākehā and Indigenous Māori communities.
To contrast these concerns, ‘Chapter 6: A surprise twist? Older New Zealanders as approachable and accepting’ first discusses multi-generational ambivalence around negative stereotypes about older adults and then shows how her research sample of female immigrants perceived older New Zealanders to be accepting, approachable and tolerant. For these women, older adults had time for interaction with and communication about immigrants’ concerns, which George argues also mitigates the likelihood of social isolation. ‘Chapter 7: Mentoring “Kiwiness”’ shows how older adults tried to instruct immigrants on adopting local norms of being ‘Kiwi’ (an ethnonym used by older New Zealanders to identify themselves), from ideal gender roles to assistance in everyday life, like aiding someone to catch a bus.
In ‘Chapter 8: Cosmopolitan cadences’, George first notes the contradiction that older adults’ negative concerns about immigration reflect macro-level issues, while their everyday ‘micropublic’ interactions exemplify cosmopolitan ideals like openness and kindness to strangers (p. 139). She then argues that this openness is generated by a particular cadence, namely, that slower pace of life facilitated by retirement and non-preoccupation with smartphones and technology. In ‘Chapter 9: Conclusions’, George revisits her claims and poetically characterises older adults who age-in-place as ‘mooring posts’ around whom sea-like tides of change and waves of globally mobile people flow through time and the lifecourse (p. 142).
This book clarifies how older adults shape dynamics of contemporary multi-culturalism and cosmopolitanism as generated through immigration. Rather than providing opinions, older adults create productive, mutual relationships with immigrants on their own terms and times and illuminate global histories of immigration through their lived experience, countering the racist narrative. While her methodological approach attempts to avoid essentialising participants’ racial identities by collectively characterising her primary sample as simply ‘older New Zealanders’, her secondary data and participants’ own quotes clearly depict how most older adults she met, and in New Zealand in total, are white and interact with and differently perceive immigrants of colour. This latter group was not her primary focus, and she notes the non-inclusion of male immigrants as a limitation, but including (female) immigrants as a secondary sample and focus of Chapter 6 functions to illustrate her main point that older (white) New Zealanders are accepting.
Ethnicity and race are not necessarily within her purview, even as their dynamics may inform (anti-)immigration policy and rhetoric, although a minority of her sample self-identify as racists or sympathise with peers’ racist sentiments. Readers may be led to believe that this is part of her scope, given that the Introduction opens with the subsection ‘The narrative of the old racist person’ (p. 1). However, this stereotype ultimately serves as a counterpoint to the main point that most older adults are open, accepting and cosmopolitan. Overall, the book is a readable, teachable case study and has comparative potential for research in other migrant-receiving, multicultural countries with ageing populations that are also majority-white, like the US, the UK and Canada.
