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Lifecourse and Aging
HAIM HAZAN
Abstract
This essay addresses the need of peoples everywhere to think about the human life
span as a series of discretely identifiable stages here characterized and analyzed as a
series of fundamental dimensions around which dominant cultural beliefs are commonly organized. They include: Universality versus diversity; determinacy versus
indeterminacy; social time versus experienced time; and course versus cycle. Each
dimension is described and exemplified, resulting in a framework to guide future
studies of aging and the life course.
From the riddle of the sphinx to the topsy-turvy life of Scott Fitzgerald’s
Benjamin Button, the course of life trajectory straddling cradle to grave and
beyond, has played on human imagination as well as on the formulation of
methodical paradigms. The perceptual, cultural need to encode the continuous indivisibility of experienced living into discretely identifiable units of life
sets the intertwined public and academic scene that comprehends life course
and aging in contradictory terms of opposing outlooks.
Thus, developmental perspectives on the course of life so entrenched in
contemporary therapeutic culture and in age-graded institutional arrangements, such as schools, are anchored in the spirit of progress embedded
in modernity, whereas the postmodern, global specter of “anything goes”
invokes representations of effervescent, erratic, multidirectional flows in its
own kaleidoscopic image.
Notwithstanding, epoch-related transformations in notions of the movement through life, certain persistent dilemmas could be identified as key
topics that mobilize conflicting scholarly discourses concerning the underpinnings of life course debate. The following is set to unfold these dilemmas
as a basis for offering an agenda for looking at diverse aspects of deliberating life course issues. Each dilemma profiles yet another feature in the Janus
face of the concept of the life course as an architecturally constructed process on one hand and as an experientially shaped phenomenon on the other.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
The interplay between these two epistemological impulses generates various
dialectics of power and knowledge that embody both theoretical models and
their interlocked social action.
Such ideological and practical cultural products could, for example, take
the shape of psychosociobiological models of benchmarks laid throughout
modernity oriented preset developmental trajectories, that in turn chart
age-biased normative maps. When this perspective is infused with the
zeitgeist of progress-driven modern time, it is incarnated in the regulatory
forces and ethics of presumed age-related cultures.
Such are contrived idioms of youth culture, midlife culture, and old age
culture—all under the guidance and surveillance of omnipotent and uncompromising therapeutic rituals of correction. Conversely, cyber and cinematic
society propels legitimated imagery of and opportunity for transgressing and
subverting otherwise sacrosanct age boundaries.
This dissolution of age norms, like the collapse of gender markers, not only
reshuffles the pack of life stages cards but also changes the rules of the game
to the extent that being off course in terms of socially anticipated timetables,
be it regressively or progressively, behind or ahead, is not considered deviant,
and no longer affirms the appropriate passage of life. Thus, a confluence of
two states of the cultural matter is implausibly concocted. That is, a conjunction of quiddity and liquidity. The quiddity is that of arbitrary numbers and
their subsequent solid bureaucratic thresholds, whereas the liquidity is of
meanings and forms. This dialectical union renders nowadays age-riddled
culture both insoluble and soluble at once.
The four sketchily unfolded dilemmas are as follows:
The first is in the nexus of niversality versus diversity
Biologically determined and visibly apparent, the ontology of life changes
is turned into seemingly universal epistemology that presupposes correspondence between physiological-functional transformations and assumed social
standing. The nadir of such congruity is the overall postulation of common
essential exigencies deemed vital for human survival and fulfillment in all
cultures. While this approach could be taken as somewhat obsolete due to
its in-built predicates as to the reductive driving forces that predetermine
the course of life, it nevertheless taps some of the general tenets of human
existence.
Thus, social arrangements for procreation such as the family, necessities
of economic viability, the pursuit of meaning, and the quest for a dignified
final exit could all be regarded as arguable human universals that transcend
personal differences, cultural boundaries, and social milieus.
However, as anthropology is a diversity sensitive discipline, it either documents various cultural manifestations of responding to such universals or,
alternatively, displays a spectrum of courses of aging in which each culture
Lifecourse and Aging
3
is of a different exceptional hue. This form of relentless cultural relativism,
while stymieing the anthropological imperative for systematic comparison,
offers divergent native’s points of view that highlight infinitely disparate
forking paths of life.
From the claim that social aging is absent from Indian culture through the
high emphasis on aging in Samburu gerontocracy, to the depiction of culturally contingent life course in Japan as a moving caravan of long-term generational commitments, ethnographers of life span transitions throw into relief
the outstanding cultural outlines that renders a given setting unique.
However, diversity is not merely a matter of cultural differences but also
of discrepancy in formations of identity. While in modern Western settings
the ethos of individualism reigns supreme in reckoning the predicted and
expected life span, other cultures are based on socially undifferentiated selves
that are submerged into an amalgamated oneness. This distinction between
the two modes of belonging is based on a gulf separating a notion of selfhood
as transient embodied personal entity from the idea of selfhood as a constant,
communally shared, universal-like body social. Diversity and universality
therefore are temporal signifiers rather than spatial parameters.
This observation transposes the run-off-the mill anthropological debate of
cultural relativism versus human universals from focusing on synchronic
associations to concentrating on diachronic continuities and discontinuities;
that is an epistemological shift from being to becoming, from staging to flow
and from discreteness to duration—all evidently draw on different schools of
thought and yet suggesting one dialectic of determinacy and indeterminacy.
The second dilemma thus is of determinacy versus indeterminacy:
Psychocultural developmental orientations rationalizing the vagaries
that erratically outline the course of life have invincibly permeated
modernity-stricken, progress-obsessed sociology and anthropology as well
as some branches of psychology. The patterning of life is consequently
encoded as a meaning seeking journey moving along a desired life project,
or through culturally prescribed plots. In either case, a culturally determined, almost fatalistically carved train of change is inadvertently imagined
through implicitly embodied or explicitly scripted texts of identity.
Such tracks of meaning seeking are designated to finally arrive at a tellingly
desirable departure from life, one that signifies a culturally contingent view
of the preferable ending. Subsequently, life stories rather than life histories
become yardsticks for tracking down retrospectively schemed, meaningfully
strung, chains of life events striving for the right finale.
This search for the “good death” across the life span coupled with the
Aristotelian dictum of a life worthy of living seems to impregnate that presumably ubiquitous human pursuit. No matter what the rudiments of this
set course are—evolutionary forces, innate psychological traits, fundamental
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
cultural themes—the paradigm of “soft” or “hard” determinacy prevails in
most interpretations of the dynamic forces that engender and orchestrate
the construction and the rhythm composing life courses, hopefully securing
good deaths, as many as the worldviews breeding them.
Notwithstanding the quest for determinacy, the postmodern bias toward
relational and relative veracity does take its toll on the poetics and politics of
everyday living. This is accomplished through the emphasis on the autonomy to exercise individual choice and apply personal agency against the
grain of presaged scenarios. The seeming irony of that conflated language
of contradictory terms of validating reality draws its inner persuasion from
the nexus of immortality and postmodernity in an era of endless short lived
routes and countless endings.
This duality is spectacularly highlighted by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman
in his discussion of the ceaseless masquerading of appearance and disappearance in today’s public sphere. Such a rebellion against fateful trajectories is
evinced in a number of slants to the predictable accountability to one’s life
career such as in the increase in cases of opting for individually chosen autobiographical paths or in turning to an ad hoc situational navigation of life.
A culturally expected premium is hence given to experienced reality over
superimposed structures, which in our terms means the third dilemma.
The dilemma of social time as against experienced time.
Perhaps the most dominant monitoring controller of the movement
through life is concepts of age categorization. Unlike other physiologically
apparent classificatory principles such as race and sex, age is still a Gordian
tie intractably entangling the natural and the social, thereby surpassing both
cultural codification and historical periodization. In some simple societies
where the lives of all members are converged to follow one track of living
from birth to death, “life term social arena” as coined by anthropologist
Sally Moore, the social gaze is sufficiently powerful to ensure rigid scrutiny
of age group norms subjected to nil degrees of freedom of choice.
But, age-charted normative maps are not prevalent only in such
age-segregated societies organized around age class systems based on
peer-biased division of labor. They also apply to various extents to “limited
social arena” societies where role differentiation and specialization launch
people on different, interchangeable identity tracks. In effect, the bureaucratic nature of modern society assigns a multitude of chronologically set
positions, hence amplifying the foundational power of age-fabricated stratification. Such institutional imperatives delineate and maintain age-grounded
boundaries turned out to be principal features of a culture that, contrary to
its subordination the tyrany of age, proverbially and declaratively flouts the
importance of age as a source of meaning.
Lifecourse and Aging
5
By contrast, in cultures where functional age accounts for accomplished
and acknowledged status transitions as performed in the course of rites
of passage, in modern societies that accord almost mythical significance to
the value of bureaucratically furnished numerical indices, chronological
age obtains the social classificatory and regulatory qualities of age-related
competence tests. Hence, not only has the ascribed power of age not been
curtailed in complex societies, but, in the absence of constantly consensual
criteria for allocating social resources and rewards, the prominence of the
common denominator of age as both a cultural equalizer and divider is on
the increase as identity structuring device. This happens in inverse relation
to the eclipse of the shining predominance of hegemonic cultural narratives.
Childhood and old age are complimentary yet contradictory representations
of such dual process.
While childhood is invariably assessed, carefully drafted and handled
with meticulous developmental standards and respective disciplinary
apparatuses, the category of the old is deemed loosely static and stagnant.
Although academics as well as some policy makers have long proposed
a reclassification of the elderly into subcategories of young old, old and
old–old, third age and fourth age, octogenarians and centenarians, the
cultural imagery of that general human type is of a monolithic character
often dubbed euphemistically as senior years or golden age.
The “forth age,” however a scholarly sensitized subcategory comprising
those whose life world is distinctly different from that of the rest of their old
contemporaries who still struggle to emulate midlife style, has gained only
scant heed in relevant research. This is in spite of the challenges posed by that
supposedly distinct phase to the orthodox perspectives on the life course as
a progressive sequencing of continuous change or as reflection of a steadfast
ageless self.
The elderly in general and the very old in particular are thus denied the status of pilgrims to the temples of modernity that bestow on their worshipers
an aura of socially stamped inclusionary accreditation. In that respect, the
vacuum of social death assigned to the category of the old becomes a breeding ground for the emergence of extracultural, exclusionary indestructible,
ultimate otherness. The suggestion of another time zone inherent in this kind
of conjecture broaches the fourth dilemma that destabilizes the whole concept of a life course.
That is the conflict between course and cycle or rather the transmutation
from course into cycle.
The paradox of aging as a continuous experiential process of becoming as
against the discrete category of old age as being in the world calls for cultural
resolutions to tackle its discontents. To that aim, two divergent paths are followed, each taking a different perceptual stance. The first is the insistence
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
on the conviction that elderly people are haunted by the pursuit of meaning
through dwelling on memories to the extent that some students of aging urge
elderly researchees to revisit their past as a reconstructed source for therapeutically attaining self-realization. The justification for this line of inquiry lies
in the assumption that notwithstanding apparent bodily transformations, the
old sustain an unassailable sense of a durable self.
In opposition, the second outlook turns its gaze to the terms and conditions
that circumscribe the disjointed cultural territory of the old and subsequently
re-form their lived-in experience. Thus, the forced moratorium from temporal constraints is sited in a-temporal spaces that resist or ignore change by
being exiled from the predictabilities of the course of culture. Such enclaves
range from institutions for the old, through cinematic representations to
the uniquely discordant music and literature created by the old. Contrary
to received gerontological wisdom, all of these “cultures of aging” seem
to indicate the prevalence of closure rather than flux, the presence of the
body natural rather than its symbolic embodiment, metonymic patterning
of living rather than open-ended metaphoric imagination, incoherence
rather than coherence, spatial construction of reality rather than teleological
evolution, and present-bound existence rather than future-oriented life.
This temporal turn from course into cycle, from modern-biased linearity
into pre/postmodern repetitious fragmentation offers the old a triple opportunity for taking advantage of the split between the quiddity instilled in their
phase of life and the liquidity surrounding it. Hence, and owing to that divergence in inner and outer epistemologies, the tension that produces the four
existential dilemmas no longer operates. That leaves the life world of the
old as an arena for conducting an unleashed, uncontrollable experiments in
aging in preparation for the expected and yet unknown. Three existential
options for living with and within that socially discharged last phase could
be explored, practiced, and studied.
First, a newly gained sense of liberation from norms, values, commitments,
and the futile quest for meaning; second, freedom to be concerned with the
now and here management of living under the auspices of limbo time in
which they are marooned; and third, enlisting still time to arrest impending
death by sabotaging its inevitable course.
This freshly formatted cyclical repetitive time could be pivoted on daily
recurrence of daily habits and routines, on socially affected amnesia
annulling past and obliterating future, or on holding on to unarticulated
fragments of postmodern life styles. In that sense, the monotonous patterns
of either cycle or fragment, both in defiance of coherent contexts, juxtapose,
as suggested by anthropologist Marylyn Strathern, the premodern to the
postmodern. Trapped in between, the penultimate pulse of life of the very
Lifecourse and Aging
7
old is thus turned into a-historical moment of timeless immortality just
before the final stroke of mortal time.
FURTHER READING
Bauman, Z. (1992). Mortality, immortality and other life strategies. Cambridge, England:
Polity Press.
Cole, T. R., Ray R. E., & Kastenbaum, R. (2010) A guide to humanistic studies in aging,
Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Holmes, E. R., & Holmes, L. D. (1995). Other cultures, elder years (2nd ed.). Thoussand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Johnson, M. (Ed.) (2005). The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Katz, S. (2005). Cultural aging: Life course, life style and senior worlds. Toronto, ON:
University of Toronto Press.
Moody, H. (2002). Aging, concepts and controversies. London, England: Sage.
HAIM HAZAN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Haim Hazan (PhD) is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Tel Aviv
University and an author of numerous articles and books including: The
Limbo People—A Study of the Constitution of the Time Universe among
the Aged; Managing Change in Old Age; A Paradoxical Community;
Old Age—Constructions and Deconstructions; From First Principles—An
Experiment in Aging and Simulated Dreams—Israeli Youth and Virtual
Zionism; Serendipity in Anthropological Research—The Nomadic Turn. He
is the former director of the Tel Aviv University Herczeg Institute on Aging
and a current codirector of the Tel Aviv University Minerva Center for the
Study of the End of Life.
Email address: hazan@post.tau.ac.il
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
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Lifecourse and Aging
HAIM HAZAN
Abstract
This essay addresses the need of peoples everywhere to think about the human life
span as a series of discretely identifiable stages here characterized and analyzed as a
series of fundamental dimensions around which dominant cultural beliefs are commonly organized. They include: Universality versus diversity; determinacy versus
indeterminacy; social time versus experienced time; and course versus cycle. Each
dimension is described and exemplified, resulting in a framework to guide future
studies of aging and the life course.
From the riddle of the sphinx to the topsy-turvy life of Scott Fitzgerald’s
Benjamin Button, the course of life trajectory straddling cradle to grave and
beyond, has played on human imagination as well as on the formulation of
methodical paradigms. The perceptual, cultural need to encode the continuous indivisibility of experienced living into discretely identifiable units of life
sets the intertwined public and academic scene that comprehends life course
and aging in contradictory terms of opposing outlooks.
Thus, developmental perspectives on the course of life so entrenched in
contemporary therapeutic culture and in age-graded institutional arrangements, such as schools, are anchored in the spirit of progress embedded
in modernity, whereas the postmodern, global specter of “anything goes”
invokes representations of effervescent, erratic, multidirectional flows in its
own kaleidoscopic image.
Notwithstanding, epoch-related transformations in notions of the movement through life, certain persistent dilemmas could be identified as key
topics that mobilize conflicting scholarly discourses concerning the underpinnings of life course debate. The following is set to unfold these dilemmas
as a basis for offering an agenda for looking at diverse aspects of deliberating life course issues. Each dilemma profiles yet another feature in the Janus
face of the concept of the life course as an architecturally constructed process on one hand and as an experientially shaped phenomenon on the other.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
The interplay between these two epistemological impulses generates various
dialectics of power and knowledge that embody both theoretical models and
their interlocked social action.
Such ideological and practical cultural products could, for example, take
the shape of psychosociobiological models of benchmarks laid throughout
modernity oriented preset developmental trajectories, that in turn chart
age-biased normative maps. When this perspective is infused with the
zeitgeist of progress-driven modern time, it is incarnated in the regulatory
forces and ethics of presumed age-related cultures.
Such are contrived idioms of youth culture, midlife culture, and old age
culture—all under the guidance and surveillance of omnipotent and uncompromising therapeutic rituals of correction. Conversely, cyber and cinematic
society propels legitimated imagery of and opportunity for transgressing and
subverting otherwise sacrosanct age boundaries.
This dissolution of age norms, like the collapse of gender markers, not only
reshuffles the pack of life stages cards but also changes the rules of the game
to the extent that being off course in terms of socially anticipated timetables,
be it regressively or progressively, behind or ahead, is not considered deviant,
and no longer affirms the appropriate passage of life. Thus, a confluence of
two states of the cultural matter is implausibly concocted. That is, a conjunction of quiddity and liquidity. The quiddity is that of arbitrary numbers and
their subsequent solid bureaucratic thresholds, whereas the liquidity is of
meanings and forms. This dialectical union renders nowadays age-riddled
culture both insoluble and soluble at once.
The four sketchily unfolded dilemmas are as follows:
The first is in the nexus of niversality versus diversity
Biologically determined and visibly apparent, the ontology of life changes
is turned into seemingly universal epistemology that presupposes correspondence between physiological-functional transformations and assumed social
standing. The nadir of such congruity is the overall postulation of common
essential exigencies deemed vital for human survival and fulfillment in all
cultures. While this approach could be taken as somewhat obsolete due to
its in-built predicates as to the reductive driving forces that predetermine
the course of life, it nevertheless taps some of the general tenets of human
existence.
Thus, social arrangements for procreation such as the family, necessities
of economic viability, the pursuit of meaning, and the quest for a dignified
final exit could all be regarded as arguable human universals that transcend
personal differences, cultural boundaries, and social milieus.
However, as anthropology is a diversity sensitive discipline, it either documents various cultural manifestations of responding to such universals or,
alternatively, displays a spectrum of courses of aging in which each culture
Lifecourse and Aging
3
is of a different exceptional hue. This form of relentless cultural relativism,
while stymieing the anthropological imperative for systematic comparison,
offers divergent native’s points of view that highlight infinitely disparate
forking paths of life.
From the claim that social aging is absent from Indian culture through the
high emphasis on aging in Samburu gerontocracy, to the depiction of culturally contingent life course in Japan as a moving caravan of long-term generational commitments, ethnographers of life span transitions throw into relief
the outstanding cultural outlines that renders a given setting unique.
However, diversity is not merely a matter of cultural differences but also
of discrepancy in formations of identity. While in modern Western settings
the ethos of individualism reigns supreme in reckoning the predicted and
expected life span, other cultures are based on socially undifferentiated selves
that are submerged into an amalgamated oneness. This distinction between
the two modes of belonging is based on a gulf separating a notion of selfhood
as transient embodied personal entity from the idea of selfhood as a constant,
communally shared, universal-like body social. Diversity and universality
therefore are temporal signifiers rather than spatial parameters.
This observation transposes the run-off-the mill anthropological debate of
cultural relativism versus human universals from focusing on synchronic
associations to concentrating on diachronic continuities and discontinuities;
that is an epistemological shift from being to becoming, from staging to flow
and from discreteness to duration—all evidently draw on different schools of
thought and yet suggesting one dialectic of determinacy and indeterminacy.
The second dilemma thus is of determinacy versus indeterminacy:
Psychocultural developmental orientations rationalizing the vagaries
that erratically outline the course of life have invincibly permeated
modernity-stricken, progress-obsessed sociology and anthropology as well
as some branches of psychology. The patterning of life is consequently
encoded as a meaning seeking journey moving along a desired life project,
or through culturally prescribed plots. In either case, a culturally determined, almost fatalistically carved train of change is inadvertently imagined
through implicitly embodied or explicitly scripted texts of identity.
Such tracks of meaning seeking are designated to finally arrive at a tellingly
desirable departure from life, one that signifies a culturally contingent view
of the preferable ending. Subsequently, life stories rather than life histories
become yardsticks for tracking down retrospectively schemed, meaningfully
strung, chains of life events striving for the right finale.
This search for the “good death” across the life span coupled with the
Aristotelian dictum of a life worthy of living seems to impregnate that presumably ubiquitous human pursuit. No matter what the rudiments of this
set course are—evolutionary forces, innate psychological traits, fundamental
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
cultural themes—the paradigm of “soft” or “hard” determinacy prevails in
most interpretations of the dynamic forces that engender and orchestrate
the construction and the rhythm composing life courses, hopefully securing
good deaths, as many as the worldviews breeding them.
Notwithstanding the quest for determinacy, the postmodern bias toward
relational and relative veracity does take its toll on the poetics and politics of
everyday living. This is accomplished through the emphasis on the autonomy to exercise individual choice and apply personal agency against the
grain of presaged scenarios. The seeming irony of that conflated language
of contradictory terms of validating reality draws its inner persuasion from
the nexus of immortality and postmodernity in an era of endless short lived
routes and countless endings.
This duality is spectacularly highlighted by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman
in his discussion of the ceaseless masquerading of appearance and disappearance in today’s public sphere. Such a rebellion against fateful trajectories is
evinced in a number of slants to the predictable accountability to one’s life
career such as in the increase in cases of opting for individually chosen autobiographical paths or in turning to an ad hoc situational navigation of life.
A culturally expected premium is hence given to experienced reality over
superimposed structures, which in our terms means the third dilemma.
The dilemma of social time as against experienced time.
Perhaps the most dominant monitoring controller of the movement
through life is concepts of age categorization. Unlike other physiologically
apparent classificatory principles such as race and sex, age is still a Gordian
tie intractably entangling the natural and the social, thereby surpassing both
cultural codification and historical periodization. In some simple societies
where the lives of all members are converged to follow one track of living
from birth to death, “life term social arena” as coined by anthropologist
Sally Moore, the social gaze is sufficiently powerful to ensure rigid scrutiny
of age group norms subjected to nil degrees of freedom of choice.
But, age-charted normative maps are not prevalent only in such
age-segregated societies organized around age class systems based on
peer-biased division of labor. They also apply to various extents to “limited
social arena” societies where role differentiation and specialization launch
people on different, interchangeable identity tracks. In effect, the bureaucratic nature of modern society assigns a multitude of chronologically set
positions, hence amplifying the foundational power of age-fabricated stratification. Such institutional imperatives delineate and maintain age-grounded
boundaries turned out to be principal features of a culture that, contrary to
its subordination the tyrany of age, proverbially and declaratively flouts the
importance of age as a source of meaning.
Lifecourse and Aging
5
By contrast, in cultures where functional age accounts for accomplished
and acknowledged status transitions as performed in the course of rites
of passage, in modern societies that accord almost mythical significance to
the value of bureaucratically furnished numerical indices, chronological
age obtains the social classificatory and regulatory qualities of age-related
competence tests. Hence, not only has the ascribed power of age not been
curtailed in complex societies, but, in the absence of constantly consensual
criteria for allocating social resources and rewards, the prominence of the
common denominator of age as both a cultural equalizer and divider is on
the increase as identity structuring device. This happens in inverse relation
to the eclipse of the shining predominance of hegemonic cultural narratives.
Childhood and old age are complimentary yet contradictory representations
of such dual process.
While childhood is invariably assessed, carefully drafted and handled
with meticulous developmental standards and respective disciplinary
apparatuses, the category of the old is deemed loosely static and stagnant.
Although academics as well as some policy makers have long proposed
a reclassification of the elderly into subcategories of young old, old and
old–old, third age and fourth age, octogenarians and centenarians, the
cultural imagery of that general human type is of a monolithic character
often dubbed euphemistically as senior years or golden age.
The “forth age,” however a scholarly sensitized subcategory comprising
those whose life world is distinctly different from that of the rest of their old
contemporaries who still struggle to emulate midlife style, has gained only
scant heed in relevant research. This is in spite of the challenges posed by that
supposedly distinct phase to the orthodox perspectives on the life course as
a progressive sequencing of continuous change or as reflection of a steadfast
ageless self.
The elderly in general and the very old in particular are thus denied the status of pilgrims to the temples of modernity that bestow on their worshipers
an aura of socially stamped inclusionary accreditation. In that respect, the
vacuum of social death assigned to the category of the old becomes a breeding ground for the emergence of extracultural, exclusionary indestructible,
ultimate otherness. The suggestion of another time zone inherent in this kind
of conjecture broaches the fourth dilemma that destabilizes the whole concept of a life course.
That is the conflict between course and cycle or rather the transmutation
from course into cycle.
The paradox of aging as a continuous experiential process of becoming as
against the discrete category of old age as being in the world calls for cultural
resolutions to tackle its discontents. To that aim, two divergent paths are followed, each taking a different perceptual stance. The first is the insistence
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
on the conviction that elderly people are haunted by the pursuit of meaning
through dwelling on memories to the extent that some students of aging urge
elderly researchees to revisit their past as a reconstructed source for therapeutically attaining self-realization. The justification for this line of inquiry lies
in the assumption that notwithstanding apparent bodily transformations, the
old sustain an unassailable sense of a durable self.
In opposition, the second outlook turns its gaze to the terms and conditions
that circumscribe the disjointed cultural territory of the old and subsequently
re-form their lived-in experience. Thus, the forced moratorium from temporal constraints is sited in a-temporal spaces that resist or ignore change by
being exiled from the predictabilities of the course of culture. Such enclaves
range from institutions for the old, through cinematic representations to
the uniquely discordant music and literature created by the old. Contrary
to received gerontological wisdom, all of these “cultures of aging” seem
to indicate the prevalence of closure rather than flux, the presence of the
body natural rather than its symbolic embodiment, metonymic patterning
of living rather than open-ended metaphoric imagination, incoherence
rather than coherence, spatial construction of reality rather than teleological
evolution, and present-bound existence rather than future-oriented life.
This temporal turn from course into cycle, from modern-biased linearity
into pre/postmodern repetitious fragmentation offers the old a triple opportunity for taking advantage of the split between the quiddity instilled in their
phase of life and the liquidity surrounding it. Hence, and owing to that divergence in inner and outer epistemologies, the tension that produces the four
existential dilemmas no longer operates. That leaves the life world of the
old as an arena for conducting an unleashed, uncontrollable experiments in
aging in preparation for the expected and yet unknown. Three existential
options for living with and within that socially discharged last phase could
be explored, practiced, and studied.
First, a newly gained sense of liberation from norms, values, commitments,
and the futile quest for meaning; second, freedom to be concerned with the
now and here management of living under the auspices of limbo time in
which they are marooned; and third, enlisting still time to arrest impending
death by sabotaging its inevitable course.
This freshly formatted cyclical repetitive time could be pivoted on daily
recurrence of daily habits and routines, on socially affected amnesia
annulling past and obliterating future, or on holding on to unarticulated
fragments of postmodern life styles. In that sense, the monotonous patterns
of either cycle or fragment, both in defiance of coherent contexts, juxtapose,
as suggested by anthropologist Marylyn Strathern, the premodern to the
postmodern. Trapped in between, the penultimate pulse of life of the very
Lifecourse and Aging
7
old is thus turned into a-historical moment of timeless immortality just
before the final stroke of mortal time.
FURTHER READING
Bauman, Z. (1992). Mortality, immortality and other life strategies. Cambridge, England:
Polity Press.
Cole, T. R., Ray R. E., & Kastenbaum, R. (2010) A guide to humanistic studies in aging,
Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Holmes, E. R., & Holmes, L. D. (1995). Other cultures, elder years (2nd ed.). Thoussand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Johnson, M. (Ed.) (2005). The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Katz, S. (2005). Cultural aging: Life course, life style and senior worlds. Toronto, ON:
University of Toronto Press.
Moody, H. (2002). Aging, concepts and controversies. London, England: Sage.
HAIM HAZAN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Haim Hazan (PhD) is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Tel Aviv
University and an author of numerous articles and books including: The
Limbo People—A Study of the Constitution of the Time Universe among
the Aged; Managing Change in Old Age; A Paradoxical Community;
Old Age—Constructions and Deconstructions; From First Principles—An
Experiment in Aging and Simulated Dreams—Israeli Youth and Virtual
Zionism; Serendipity in Anthropological Research—The Nomadic Turn. He
is the former director of the Tel Aviv University Herczeg Institute on Aging
and a current codirector of the Tel Aviv University Minerva Center for the
Study of the End of Life.
Email address: hazan@post.tau.ac.il
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