Cultures of Ageing in Thailand and Australia. (What Can an Ageing Body Do?)

Abstract

The ‘cultural turn’ in social gerontology addresses how ageing subjectivities emerge from social and cultural contexts. This article reports a phenomenological study of experiences of ageing in Thailand and Australia based on ethnography and interviews with older people in each setting. The data suggest that cultural contexts, issues of embodiment, dependency and institutionalization, and positive experiences of care are elements from which older people construct embodied subjectivities. The article is critical of approaches that suggest that reflexive modernization can explain the experience of ageing, and suggests that the cultural mediation of a disparate range of social relations can be understood by asking ‘what can an ageing body do?’