Silver-haired society: what are the implications?

Debate Section

R O G E R G O O D M A N

Silver-haired society: what arethe implications?

I

The implications of an ageing society are manifold: for family structures and othernetworks, for employment patterns and gender roles, for pension and health systems,for immigration policy, consumer and voting behaviour, among a range of variables.What underlies the way that a society responds to these implications, however, isdetermined by how they perceive the process of their population ageing in the firstplace.

Japan has long been the ‘test case’ for ageing in Asia and concerns aboutdemographic change underlie almost all current economic, social and political policy-making in the country. What the Japanese case most clearly shows is how ramified thewhole topic of ageing is. In particular it shows how easy it is to confuse the ageing ofa population with related but separate issues such as longevity and dependency. Andmost importantly, it shows how people who happen to live a long time can be blamedfor a myriad of problems throughout their own society. I want to untangle some of thevariables in the Japanese case in order to challenge the generally negative view of theageing process in the society. I will end with what I think is the anthropological puzzlethat this leaves us with on which I look forward to the thoughts of Haim Hazan.

In 2005, Japan officially had the oldest population in the world with a medianaverage of just over 43 years (it was just over 22 in 1950). By 2025, almost 30% ofJapan’s population will be 65 or over and it will have almost as many people over theage of 80 as under the age of 15; barely two people of so-called working age (15–64) willbe supporting every person of ‘retirement’ age, 65 or over. There are two unconnectedreasons for Japan’s ageing population. On the one hand, people in Japan are livinglonger than anywhere else in the world. Average life expectancies at birth increasedfrom around 50 for men and 54 for women in 1947 to a combined average of 81.9 in2005. At the same time as longevity increased, the number of children born in Japandeclined dramatically. The total fertility rate dropped from 4.32 in 1949 to 1.57 in1989 (when only 1.25 million babies were born in a population of over 120 million).Japan’s declining birth rate is an immensely complicated topic, which cannot detain ushere. It was, however, the combination of the rapid decline in the fertility rate withrapidly increasing longevity that led to what is most commonly described in Japan asthe ‘chokorei shakai’ (hyper-aged society).

210 Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2010) 18, 2 210–219. C© 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists.doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2010.00103.x

SILVER-HAIRED SOCIETY 211

As Coulmas (2007) points out, there is a sense that the situation in Japan constitutesa ‘problem’. In part, this is because, unlike most other OECD countries, Japan had noplans for other than the most minimal amount of immigration. At the same time, asKwon (1999) pointed out at the end of the 1990s, there has been a declining and lowerlevel of financial support for older people in Japan by their own children (15.6% of theirtotal income in 1981; 9.0% in 1988) compared to some other East Asian societies (forexample, Korea, 44.3% in 1994; Taiwan, 53.2% in 1994). Hence, the comparatively (byAsian standards) high reliance of Japan’s older population on state pensions (alreadyover 50% of their total income package at the end of the 1980s) means that the workingpopulation will have to transfer much more of its wealth if the current system ofintergenerational, pay-as-you-go pension payments persists. Overall, as Harper (2006)has suggested, there is a general apprehension among the public across Asia that the shiftsin the global demography will lead to a dramatic reduction in government capabilitiesto provide services for their rapidly ageing populations; national health services,and even whole economies, are predicted to collapse under the strain of health andpension demands, and families will no longer be there to compensate for failing publicprovision.

As Harper and I (2006) have discussed elsewhere, the reality, however, is far morecomplex and susceptible to policy changes. Indeed, the three major concerns – publicspending on pensions, high dependency ratios between workers and non-workers, anda slowdown in consumption due to an increase in older people and a decrease in youngerpeople – are dynamics of current cohorts and the current time period. They are notfixed. While they are all of key importance, they are also concerns that it is possible toaddress through policy.

For example, in terms of health costs, Leeson (2004) has shown that althougha number of cross-national studies have considered the determinants of health carecosts, only one has found the age structure of the population – with the age structureindicator defined as the proportion of population aged 65 and over – to be theexplanatory factor. Rather it is the wider effects of income, lifestyle characteristics,new technology and environmental factors that have been driving up demand. Or ifwe look at pension costs, Heller (2003) has proposed that the main fiscal pressuresoriginate from the existing framework of social insurance in many countries. As withhealth care costs, it is not demographic ageing per se, but current policy frameworksand other social and economic factors associated with these that are the major factorsat play here. The problems arise more from labour markets that have used retirementas a regulating mechanism in times of labour over-supply, and pension systems thathave allowed healthy active individuals to withdraw from economic activity, thanfrom the presence of large numbers of older people who are unable to work due totheir age. Similarly, family structures and the widespread provision of public formsof care may be changing, but there is little evidence from studies across the worldthat kin do not continue to ensure that their family members are cared for andsupported.

The Japanese case specifically also directly challenges some widely held concernsabout ageing societies. For example, the fact that the fertility rate is declining at the sametime as the population is ageing means that there are fewer young people to supportand hence the overall dependency ratio (the so-called ‘productive population’ of thosebetween the ages of 15 and 64 divided by those under 15 and over 64) will be virtually the

C© 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

212 ROGER GOODMAN AND HAIM HAZAN

same (1.5 workers per dependant) in 2020 as in 1950 (Ferries 1996) and is not expectedto be far out of line with that of its OECD competitors during the first half of thetwenty-first century (Hill 1996).

It could be argued that it costs more to support an older person than a youngone, but Japan’s older population is, in relative terms, an affluent one: a nationallivelihood survey from 2002 showed that the average per capita income of so-called‘senior households’ (households with no one between the ages of 19 and 64) was 91%of the average of all households. In part this is due to the fact that, by OECD standards,there is a much higher proportion of Japanese people, both men and women, agedover 64 in the workplace; as Usui (2003) points out, ‘active ageing’ is on the rise inJapan and many people well into their seventies increasingly contribute directly to theeconomy. Rather more surprisingly, as Campbell (2003) says, while Japan is a muchmore mature society than the US, its expenditure on medical care as a proportionof GDP is roughly half, due to a much more efficient system of allocating medicalresources.

The Japanese experience of an ageing population is in many ways a test case for othersocieties. The dramatic demographic shift that is taking place in the country directly orindirectly affects every sector of society and has generally been talked about in termsof constituting a ‘national crisis’. There is room, however, for a more positive view.The changing demographic structure in Japan could lead ultimately to a more open,international, egalitarian society with a generally high quality of life for the population asa whole. The question that this raises for anthropologists is: why – even in a society likeJapan, which some authors (e.g. Palmore 1975) have told us is supposed to particularlyrespect their aged – do societies construct ageing in such a negative manner and appearto ignore evidence to the contrary?

ReferencesCampbell, J. C. 2003. ‘Population ageing: hardly Japan’s biggest problem’, Asia Program Special Report

No. 107, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (January): 10–15.Coulmas, F. 2007. Population decline and ageing in Japan: the social consequences. London:

Routledge.Ferries, J. 1996. Obasuteyama in modern Japan: ageing, ageism and government policy, in R. Goodman

and I. Neary (eds.), Case studies on human rights in Japan. Kent: Japan Library CurzonPress.

Goodman, R. and S. Harper 2006. ‘Asia’s position in the new global demography’, Oxford DevelopmentStudies 34: 373–85.

Harper, S. 2006. Ageing societies: myths, challenges and opportunities. London: Hodder Arnold.Heller, P. 2003. Who will pay? Washington: IMF.Hill, M. 1996. Social policy: a comparative analysis. London: Prentice Hall.Kwon, H.-J. 1999. Income transfers to the elderly in East Asia: testing Asian values. London: London

School of Economics: STICERD, CASE paper 27.Leeson, G. 2004. The demographics and economics of UK health and social care for older adults. Oxford:

OIA.Palmore, E. 1975. The honorable elders: a cross-cultural analysis of aging in Japan. Durham: Duke

University Press.Usui, C. 2005. ‘Japan’s ageing dilemma?’ Asia Program Special Report No. 107, Woodrow Wilson

International Center for Scholars ( January): 16–22.



H A I M H A Z A N

Response to Roger Goodman

I I

The compelling depiction of the greying of Japan is indeed a testimony to the exponentialinflux in public expenditure designated to the elderly in the Western world. In thatrespect the Japanese case reflects some global trends in biomedicine, growing awarenessof its economic consequences and increasing concern for demographic drifts. Suchsocial anxieties, some of which are often expressed in moral panics (Callahan 1987,1990) demonising the future elderly as predators of the common good, stem fromthe taken for granted identification between the assumed cultural category of old ageand the demographically assigned population that it purports to subsume. However, ifdemographic parameters were to be critically revisited, their constructionist foundationswould be uncovered. Thus, personal resilience (Ryff et al. 1998), mastery of culturaltoolkits (Swidler 1986), social engagements with kin and kith, multigenerational bonds,ethnic and communal affiliations are but a few examples of possible resources madeavailable to those demographically charted as members of the category of the aged.Employed as a means for resisting, defying, negotiating and managing the ravagesincurred by old age, these resources practically exonerate people in late adulthood fromthe implications of being subjugated to the welfare-riddled criteria circumscribing thatcategory. It would be hard to estimate the number of ‘third agers’ whose economicand social status does not afford them the insignia of dependent old age. However,some indications as to the changing conditions of being old could be called upon tosuggest a shift in the contours of the category. This trend is linked to the rising rate ofconsumerism among the aged (Blaikie 2002) alongside biomedical advances that improveand prolong quality of life towards the end of life. This is to the extent of reaching astate of ‘compressed morbidity’, namely the constriction of malfunctioning due to illhealth to the very end of life (Fries 1980), rather than spanning a sizeable portion ofone’s later years. This overlapping between ‘old people as people’ (Keith 1980) andthe demographic determination of old age has a twofold ramification: a gerontologicalmisnomer and an anthropological challenge.

The gerontological misnomer is the designation of certain old-age attributes towhich a considerable portion of that assumed population does not answer (Katz 1996).Nevertheless, like social advocates, policy makers and welfare practitioners, academicstudents of old age hold on to their claims to a rightfully alleged constituency ofresearch and self justification. Thus, in spite of increasingly blurred age boundaries(Featherstone and Hepworth 1989; Turner 1995; Gilleard and Higgs 2000), growingvariability among the so-called elderly and the blatant rebuttal by reluctant members ofthe category of that colonised belonging, gerontologists prefer to adhere to an obsoleteBismarckian legacy that benchmarks the onset of old age at the age of mandatoryretirement (Savishinsky 2000). Thus, calls for ‘a fresh map of life’ (Laslett 1989) remainunheeded for fear of losing academic ground, and evidence testifying to a middle-age life



style adopted and cultivated by ‘baby boomers’ and their older contemporaries turningsilver hair from a euphemism for decline into an image of prowess is discounted. Thistransformation in the profile of ageing questions the overall social credibility and thedemographic usability of the gerontological territory of old age as a true-to-fact database for contemplating the measures and parameters of its incumbent’s lives. It could beargued, for instance, that valid gerontological deliberations ought to be reserved for caseswhere compatibility between cultural stereotyping and existential conditions could beestablished. Inmates of old-age homes, patients in geriatric wards and other clientsof welfare agencies, by virtue of ageing-related exigencies, are all socially inscribed asaged, thus subscribing to the cultural category of old age. Deliberately losing sight of theinadequacies of that category might temporarily safeguard the disciplinary privilegesof usurping knowledge of old age, but does no justice to the anthropological causeof applying ‘near-experience concepts’ (Geertz 1979) as representations faithful toa designated subject matter. This qualification leads to the second ramification: theanthropological challenge.

Doing ethnography presumes some identification between ‘natives’ and theircollective cultural identity. The research contingency of a split between the two israrely broached and scrutinised. The properties that make up the category of old agecould be summoned to suggest such a divorce. In other words, the proposition that oldage is a Janus-faced notion that could refer to either the cluster of tropes and mythsconstituting the cultural imagery of the category or, conversely, to the supposed carriersof the metaphoric mask of that state of being (Featherstone and Hepworth 1991). Hence,the distinction between old age and old people spells two divergent research agendas –one that studies the lives of people in their later years, and the other that addressescultural texts depicting old age. These two avenues of comprehending old age mightintersect, run parallel or flirt with each other. They are not mutually exclusive, but onedoes not necessitate the other, as is the case with racism and sexism whose social potencyis not contingent on the presence or absence of their embodied targets. Ageism is noexception (Bytheway 1995). Fiends of cultural imagination need no incarnation, andneither do apparitions of old age that might be tarnished by the actual behaviour of theelderly. As representations often eclipse reality, the concept of old age is well rid of itsloath representatives. A version of that discrepancy could be detected in the mismatchbetween treating the category of the elderly as a social burden looming bleakly onthe horizons of prospective economic prosperity on the one hand, and putting it on acultural pedestal of reverence and respect on the other. Since the former system of socialaccountability does not inevitably inform the latter system of cultural accountability,the Japanese puzzle unfolding the incommensurability between the two is unravelled.

The juxtaposition of the two sets of codes of conduct is intriguingly interplayedwithin the life world of the elderly as it might turn into a battleground for combatingidentities. The following testimonies for such rivalries are drawn from the scene of Israeliimagined community where patterns of solidarity are often edified on the ethos of apioneering, youthful culture whose excommunicated aged inhabitants are pejorativelyidentified with the disdained diasporic Jewish fate construed as defeatist and shameful(Hazan 2000). Common conceptions of old age, therefore, stand in stark contradictionto the archetype of the ‘sabra’, the new Jew (Almog 2000), whose fortitude and gritinverts him from a victim of persecution into a sacrifice on the alter of the collectivity.Being old and feeble can live up to that expectation. Hence, some residents of an old-age home who belonged to the founding military and political elite of nation building



endeavoured to remove from the institution those whose bodies and minds belied therequirement for physical and mental astuteness (Hazan 1992) and a group of retiredarmy generals patently ignored the ageing processes that befell them, while recountingtheir ageless life stories (Spector-Marsel 2006). The banishment of ageing from the midstof old age encapsulates the double bind instilled in a self-subversive category. In effect, itwould be necessary to turn our gaze to self-deprecating elderly to recognise the narks ofthat self-contradictory social construction. The current rampant pursuit of anti-ageingpractices, the carnivalistic mode of postmodern living that allows for gender and agereversals and flux, and late capitalist separation between the power of consumerismand the labour market that could invest capital in the fabrication of youth-alike selfimages (Biggs 2004) – amount to a practical possibility of reshuffling and revising thecomponents of old age as a new creation. Following Butler’s (1990) understanding ofthe potentialities of contravening set dichotomies of gender, it would be intriguingto apply her trail of thought to analysing old-age management among the sociallybranded aged. Virtual interactive communication, for example, could obtain novel waysof reconstituting identities (Featherstone 1995), among which the suspension of age-related characteristics is prominent. Old age as a new testing ground for reflectingthe tenor of the time could be reshaped and re-emerge beyond recognition, hence theprecarious tenability of the category at stake.

ReferencesAlmog, O. 2000. The Sabra: the creation of the new Jew. Berkeley: The University of California Press.Biggs, S. 2004. ‘Age, gender narratives and masquerades’, Journal of Aging Studies 18: 45–58.Blaikie, A. 2002. The secret world of subcultural aging: what unites and what divides, in Anderson, L.

(ed.), Cultural gerontology, 96–110. Westport: Auburn House.Butler, J. 1990. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.Bytheway, B. 1995. Ageism. Buckingham: Open University Press.Callahan, D. 1987. Setting limits: medical goals in an aging society. New York: Simon and Schuster.Callahan, D. 1990. What kind of life: the limits of medical progress. New York: Simon and Schuster.Featherstone, M. 1995. Post-bodies, aging and virtual reality, in M. Featherstone and A. Wernick (eds.),

Images of aging, 227–44. London: Routledge.Featherstone, M. and M. Hepworth, 1989. Aging and old age: reflections on the postmodern life course,

in B. Bytheway, T. Keil, P. Allat and B. Bryman (eds.), Becoming old: sociological approaches tolater life. London: Sage.

Featherstone, M. and M. Hepworth, 1991. The mask of ageing and the postmodern life course, in M.Featherstone, M. Hepworth and B. Turner (eds.), The body: social processes and cultural theory,370–89. London: Sage.

Fries, J. F. 1980. ‘Aging, natural death and the compression of morbidity’, New England Journal ofMedicine 303: 130–5.

Geertz, C. 1979. From the native’s point of view: on the nature of anthropological understanding,in P. Rabinow and W. N. Sullivan (eds.), Interpretive social science: a reader, 225–41. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Gilleard, C. and P. Higgs 2000. Cultures of ageing. Self, citizen and the body. Essex: Prentice Hall.Hazan, H. 1992. Managing change in old age: the control of meaning in an institutional setting. New

York: State University of New York Press.Hazan, H. 2000. ‘Terms of visibility: eldercare in an aging nation-state. The Israeli case’, Journal of

Family Issues 21: 733–50.Katz, S. 1996. Disciplining old age: the formation of gerontological knowledge. Charlottesville: University

Press of Virginia.



Keith, J. 1982. Old people as people: social and cultural influences on aging and old age. Boston: Little,Brown.

Laslett, P. 1989. A fresh map of life: the emergence of the third age. London: Weidenfeld Nicolson.Ryff, C. D., B. Singer, G. Dienberg, M. J. Essex 1998. Resilience in adulthood and later life: defining

features and dynamic process’, in Jacob Lomranz (ed.), Handbook of aging and mental health,69–96. New York: Plenum Press.

Savishinsky, J. S. 2000. Breaking the watch: the meaning of retirement in America. Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press.

Spector-Marsel, G. 2006. ‘Never-aging stories: western hegemonic masculinity scripts’, Gender Studies15: 49–82.

Swidler, A. 1986. ‘Culture in action: symbols and strategies’, American Sociological Review 51: 273–86.Turner, B. 1995. Aging and identity: some reflections on the somatization of the self, in M. Featherstone

and A. Wernick (eds.), Images of aging, 245–62. London: Routledge.

R O G E R G O O D M A N

Response to Haim Hazan

I I I

One of the persistent puzzles for people living in Japan is why, in a society which we aretold reveres (even worships) its elders, it is necessary to have seats reserved for them ontrains and constant announcements reminding younger people to give up those seats.Haim Hazan goes a long way towards solving this puzzle through his reminder thatwe must always separate the realities of the experience of the aged in any society fromthe perception of that experience. In some ways, of course, this is a distinction betweenthe sociology and the anthropology of the aged. Sociologists classically empiricallytest the social conditions (and the reasons for the social conditions) of the aged in anysociety at a particular point of time controlling for all the variables that may intercedein the process. Anthropologists looks at the structural and ritual systems that constructand constrain those experiences and at the ways in which the aged themselves can actupon them.

The reverence that is shown to the aged in Japan has, of course, a number of socialand political ramifications. At one level, it might be seen as a means of putting themin a collective ‘box’ and thereby reducing their potential for social activism. The ideathat they should be given special seats (in a society where the social anthropologistNakane Chie (1973) has famously pointed out, it is unusual to give up anything tothose outside one’s own group) and the depictions of them as infirm that go with thoseexhortations to give them a seat, serve to present them as in need of support ratherthan as the politically and economically powerful lobby that the aged collectively couldbe in Japan. The exhortations, at the same time, serve to remind the society of theirindividual as well as collective responsibility to look after the aged, which is at the rootof the way that the Japanese social welfare system operates. The development of this



system (which has been much studied by politicians from around the world, not leastbecause it is so comparatively cheap to run) is worth rehearsing because it demonstrateshow social policy is so closely tied to the construction of social categories and socialresponsibilities.

The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the institution of universal health and pensioninsurance in Japan, and there was a plan in the late 1960s to introduce a welfareregime along the lines of those that had developed in Western Europe in the post-war period (Campbell 1992). This went into rapid reverse with the oil shock of 1973. Inits place, there emerged a model that came to be known as the ‘Japanese-style welfaresociety’ (Nihongata shakai fukushi shakai). The idea of a Japanese-style welfare societywas rather confused but, essentially, it was expected that the family, community andcompany, rather than the state, would take on the major burden of social welfare, andthat government expenditure on social security would be maintained at a lower level thanin the Western ‘welfare state’. Indeed, as Harada (1998: 198–202) points out, the modelwas called a ‘welfare society’ as opposed to a ‘welfare state’ in order to emphasise thatpeople should not come to depend on the state but on self-help, communal solidarity,the family and the firm. (See Baba Keinosuke (1980) for the most-cited account of whatconstitute the main features of the Japanese-style welfare society.) As anthropologists,therefore, we need to both unpack the taken-for-granted assumptions that lie behindthe production of policy (and in particular what is meant by such categories as ‘aged’or ‘carer’) and the process by which policy is constructed, challenged, manipulated,mediated, ignored or accepted.

Ultimately anthropology should be more than just the analysis of the constructionsof the aged and the policies that are set in place to care for them. The Stanford-trainedJapanese anthropologist Mariko Fujita-Sano (2009: 7) has argued that anthropologyshould ‘contribute to the issues of well-being and life-design’ and has incorporatedsuch an approach into her comparative study of the cultural diversity of ideas aboutold age and the diversity in responses to the ageing of societies in different cultures.She is particularly struck by how in Japan the aged are consistently portrayed as ‘care-receivers’ rather than ‘care-givers’, while their US counterparts have strongly resistedthe former appellation. Her study of Senior Centres in the two societies discovered thatwhile in Japan they were largely staffed by middle-aged housewives, in the US the vastmajority of the volunteer staff were the so-called ‘aged’ themselves. Such volunteeringin the US, she argues, is seen as a ‘symbol of success’ because it reflects American valuesof independence and self-determination. In Japan, the centres are established to reflectthe classic dependency relationship between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-lawin old age in return for the services rendered by the former in earlier years. In both cases,Fujita-Sano argues, it has been assumed that this is the only way to run the centres. Thisis a classic example of how ‘culture’ both constrains the activities and institutions ofthe ‘silver-haired society’ but also is used to legitimate and ‘explain’ those systems thathave been constructed. The anthropology of the aged in turn cannot be separated fromthe anthropology of social policy and its interventions, which exist, in some form, inevery society.

ReferencesBaba, K. 1980. Fukushi Shakai no Nihonteki Keitai (The Japanese-style welfare society). Tokyo: Toyo

Keizai Shinposha.



Campbell, J. C. 1992. How policies change: the Japanese government and the aging society. Princeton:Princeton University Press.

Fujita-Sano, M. 2009. ‘Well-being in a super aging society’, Minpaku Anthropology Newsletter, 29: 6–8.Harada, S. 1998. The ageing society, the family, and social policy, in J. Banno (ed.), The political economy

of Japanese society, vol. 2: internationalisation and domestic issues. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Nakane, C. 1973. Japanese society. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

H A I M H A Z A N

Response to Roger Goodman

I V

The often reluctant consent to occupy the seat of old age by the designated elderly spellsthe resistance and resignation to publicly join the ranks of the recipients of the welfaresociety. That population of disenfranchised denizens of capitalist culture consists ofvarious groups and individuals whose ‘wasted lives’ (Bauman 2004) are at the brink ofdelegitimised existence as ‘Homo sacer’ in Agamben’s locution (Agamben 1998). Oldpeople are but one such category among many, including refugees, the homeless and theracially discarded. However, unlike other classes of the socially redundant, the stigma-cum-stigmata of silver hair is final, non-negotiable (unless dyed) and irrevocable. Latecapitalist welfare states become, therefore, breeding grounds for sprouting symbolicallyinvisible ‘asocial slice(s) of life’ (Baudrillard 1993 (1976): 163) of which the old is the mostsalient. Thus, commitment to welfare almost by definition brings to bear a double actof exclusion under the guise of inclusion. Roger Goodman aptly recognises this dualityin Japanese society and rightly takes it up to challenge the role and responsibility ofanthropology in dealing with the category of old age.

The marginality of old age as a core issue in anthropological discourse correspondsto the sequestrated spot it occupies in the public sphere (Hazan 2009), and the call forassuming anthropological accountability by attending to the amelioration of the statusand condition of the elderly within welfare settings could verge on becoming partof them. In the best of anthropological tradition, guilt-driven advocacy could easilyturn into a research enterprise in its own right and by doing so would exonerate theanthropologist from proverbial charges of exploitation and colonisation of the other.Knowledge of the old as other is, indeed, at the hub of the anthropological pursuitof ascertaining the social demarcation as well as tapping the experience of old age.The question then arises as to whether social involvement of anthropologists in theconcerns of the public sphere is not liable to compromise that desired knowledge. Thisis because the pledge for advocacy produces the old as a socially constructible and,hence, culturally manageable other whose position within a particular social systemis given to the work of various actions and interactions. In that respect the otheris an acknowledged cultural actor whose presence serves as a yardstick for definingsocial sites and identities. Otherness of that genre is relative to its cultural context and



contingent upon changing circumstances and terms of symbolic visibility. According tothis observation the very attempt of comparing modes of ageing and types of elderly, asthis exchange is set to explore, is moot for it reflects the most extreme, unyielding formof cultural relativism otherwise dubbed epistemic relativism. The otherness of the oldis vastly diverse in both terms of reverence and ascribed bodily and mental properties(Cohen 1998); yet it invariably holds in store a suggestion of universalism that cutsacross cultures and societies. In that sense it belongs to the genre of cultural relativismcoined by Brown (2008) ‘cultural relativism 2.0’, which takes into account the ubiquityof human universals as they interact with vernacular peculiarities. What is that universalthat marks the otherness of old age?

In a series of dialogues between a mentally competent and bodily fit 80-year-oldAmerican physician and a middle-aged anthropologist striving to comprehend old agewhile preparing herself for its impending ravages (Shield and Aronson 2003), the olderinterlocutor insists on the uniqueness of the temporal experience of being old, whichcould not be shared with other ages. This could be taken as a cue for searching for thatuniversal that makes up the cross-cultural category of old age. It would seem that risingto the challenge of the anthropology of old age would summon the acquired capability ofthe discipline to patrol the borders of otherness as spatiotemporal distinctiveness. Thismeasure of difference is subjected neither to the postcolonial notion of the subaltern norto the old time exotic. Rather, it is an observation point from which cultural landscapesand beyond could be viewed. The inimitable pretentious faculty of anthropologists toenter the world of the other might let her into a culturally moulded state of old-ageconsciousness that sets the elderly in a position of being cosmological paragons of theeternal now (Myerhoff 1978; Cohen 1998), living dead (Sanker 1987) or present boundpeople (Hazan 1980). In any case, the cultural transition of ageing bodies in time turnsthe perfunctory subdiscipline of studying the vagaries of old age into the cornerstoneof the anthropological edifice of understanding perceptions and constructions of time.Old age as a case study for investigating the elusive and omnipresent phenomenon oftemporality therefore should supersede the socially harnessed notion of reinforcing thefoundations of old age as a problem to be tackled.

ReferencesAgamben, G. 1998. Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Baudrillard, J. 1993 [1976]. Symbolic exchange and death. London: Sage.Bauman, Z. 2004. Wasted lives: modernity and its outcasts. Cambridge: Polity.Brown, M. F. 2008. ‘Cultural relativism 2.0’, Current Anthropology 49: 363–83.Cohen, L. 1998. No aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the bad family, and other modern things. Berkeley:

University of California Press.Hazan, H. 1980. The limbo people – a study of the constitution of the time universe among the aged.

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Hazan, H. 2009. ‘Essential others: anthropology and the return of the old savage’, Sociology and Social

Policy 29: 60–72.Myerhoff, B. 1978. Number our days. New York: Simon and Schuster.Sanker, A. 1987. The living dead: cultural aspects of the oldest old, in P. Silverman (ed.), The elderly as

modern pioneers, 345–56. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Shield, R. R. and S. M. Aronson 2003. Aging in today’s world: conversations between and anthropologist

and a physician. New York: Berghahn Books.


Silver-haired society: what are the implications?

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