The Role of Narrative Representation and Exchange in How Older People Understand Ageing

Abstract

One of our starting points was the reality that most nonacademic people — leading what they regard as their ‘ordinary’ lives — clearly do not primarily ground or obtain their view of older subjects through matters such as demographics, statistics, academic research or even in most cases from the actual lived experience of the elderly. They are swayed by and make judgements according to cultural narratives, their viability, and their apparent relevance to their own interests. Rather than solely focus upon ageing, this chapter will also consider the wider context of how both narrative representation and exchange play a vital and fundamental role both in forging social interactions and attitudes, and in creating what Margaret Somers describes in ‘The narrative constitution of identity: A relational and network approach’ as ‘narrative identity’ (605) and which can be situated through a dynamic ‘conceptual narrativity’ (606). These elements may well prove to be crucial to any really informed gerontological approach to contemporary social dynamics. Essentially, at an individual level these shaping processes emerge from a series of what Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1981) in ‘Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories’ describes as ‘social transactions’, and whose primary medium Smith identifies as being that of a ‘narrative transaction’ (229).