Abstract
This article discusses the variety of social activities of aging people in a community. The first aim of this study is to explore how to overcome two dichotomies—public–private as spheres of everyday life and third–fourth age—and by overcoming these, to make visible the personal social resources of older people, which are not usually recognized in policy discourses or in social policy research. Second, we ask whether the problem-oriented rhetoric of aging in Finnish social and rural policy can be challenged from the perspective of aging people’s activities. The article analyzes older people as actors of a rural village community and overcomes the two dichotomies mentioned above from the theoretical context of agency. In this research, rural East Finland is a case with which to investigate social relationships between people. We suggest that seniors not only participate in a variety of communal activities but also act in their homes, which are culturally coded as the territory of private life. By “just being there,” people also produce and reproduce rural communities in many ways. This is a form of action that has been largely ignored by policies, policymakers, and social studies.
Highlights
Finland is one of Western Europe’s most rural countries
Similar to other rural areas in Europe, in Finland, old people without a car and with weak local networks are in danger of being excluded from services and social relationships and many activities outside their nearest living environment
As Murdoch (2000) puts it when discussing social capital, the actions of people, including those among whom we carry out research, are inherently social and performed, continually placed within networks of social relations The attitudes and actions of people are meaningful in themselves, acting out the sociality that is often sought at the level of the community
Summary
Finland is one of Western Europe’s most rural countries. Compared with most other EU countries, the area of Finland is large, and the population size is small (5.5 million people in 2011). Access to services is often poor for people without their own cars; in East Finland, the distance to the nearest shop can be close to 100 km and in the northern part, it can be even further. Similar to other rural areas in Europe, in Finland, old people without a car and with weak local networks are in danger of being excluded from services and social relationships and many activities outside their nearest living environment Gray, Shaw, & Farrington, 2006) In those circumstances, the social situations of people with or without a car are very different. One of the most important social differences between rural people in remote areas is their travel possibilities (Tedre & Pulkkinen, 2010)
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