Paper short abstract:

Based on narrative interviews with older adults across Europe, this paper reflects on the ways in which cultural expectations and contestations of “age” present novel frames through which we can view subjectivity and solidarity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the breaking of legal, economic and social norms associated with aging. Based on ethnographic research with 100 individuals across Europe in the course of the SHAPES Horizon 2020 Action research project, we analyse how those labled ‘older adults’ see themselves, are being seen by others in different contexts, and how they disrupt consciously and unconsciously the institutionally-fabricated ways they are told they age. Looking at key-experiences such as retirement, education, health, life-satisfaction and the meaning of waiting, this paper examines how, countering the ‘burden discourse’, thick descriptions of their subjective narratives shed light on and subvert old-age stereotypes.

Presenting exemplary vignettes from our conversations, we provide empirical background on how our participants’ ways of life and interpretations of living as well as the current rupture of familiar sociality during the COVID-19 pandemic, put into question expectations and boundaries associated with “the old”. In so doing, we argue that while anthropology is comfortable in deconstructing categories like gender, race or ethnicity, “age” is still too-often framed as natural and theoretically inert, yet is clearly a space of cultural expectations and contestations. Following the ways in which some of our research participants subvert stereotypes of aging - symbolically “wearing purple”, as Jenny Joseph has suggested in her poem in the 1960s - we conclude by reflecting on how “age” its satisfactions and its dissatisfactions, present novel frames through which we can view subjectivity and solidarity.