Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses ageing in Namibia's Zambezi Region, exploring diverse frameworks beyond chronological age. It highlights how age emerges from material encounters, discussing practices of determining seniority and juniority, including generational belonging, kinship, education, and wealth.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores ageing in Namibia's Zambezi Region through an ethnographic case study. I discuss several examples of people's practices of determining who is senior and who is junior in different situations – and where age appears not as the result of a counting mind, but as an emergent property of material encounters of human and more-than-human beings. The area in which I conducted this research is particularly interesting in this respect because of the wide variety of different frameworks available for determining age. For example, there were notions of innate age in terms of belonging to a generation, i.e. a cohort of individuals born around the same time, and notions of innate age in terms of kinship structure, i.e. one's age being related to one's position in the lineage - in these cases age can be conceptualised as a relationship between people, which is important, for example, in determining who becomes a village elder – and when. But there were also notions of acquired age in terms of levels of formal education and wealth. Here, age can be conceptualised as the relationship between people and material goods that mark status. Furthermore, the establishment of a formal conservation project manifested a linear frame of waiting for development, which contrasted with the primarily circular frames of agropastoral livelihoods. This is an example of determining age in relation to a non-human environment conceived as lacking infrastructural development; one becomes old by waiting for things that do not materialise