Paper short abstract:

In an aging country as France, biomedicine focuses on the prevention of chronic diseases and promotes an “active” or “successful” aging. Nevertheless the simple presence of elderly migrants menaces the legitimacy of prevention and revels the increasingly and powerful medicalization of aging.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary medical anthropologists used the Foucauldian concept of biopower to understand the professional authority of biomedicine to define the limits between normal and pathological aging (Rose 2006, Lock 2013, Pasquarelli 2018). Following this critical approach, I propose to analyze the social notion of aging in contemporary society. In this context, the promotion of health imposes a peculiar political technology on individuals and populations which focuses on the prevention of chronic diseases in order to manage their “active” or “successful” aging. My proposal arises from my latest researches in medical anthropology. With a workfield mainly based in urban agglomerations between the central districts of Paris and the Department of Seine-Saint-Denis, they allow us to consider the first-generation migrants, especially from Maghreb, as double suspected to be potential transgressors of biomedical rules: because of their ageing and cultural origins. According to Fassin (2002), this point of view risks to reduce the migrant’s health only to his cultural aspects and the migrant himself to the prototype of the absolute otherness. Instead, the migrants I interviewed have integrated into their own system of knowledge the biomedical perspective on aging and used hybrid and culturally heterogeneous meanings to understand their personal ageing as normal or pathological. Nevertheless, the simple presence of different forms of aging menaces the socio-cultural and historical context in which the urgency of prevention of chronic disease was burn and revels the emergence of a bio-politics of the self, based on the increasingly medicalization of aging.