Time, Memory and the Life Course

Abstract

This book has explored a core tension: the tension between the individual’s capacity to make and re-make themselves, to resist the penalties, constraints and imperatives of ‘social structure’ and the ageing body, and their dependence upon ‘the social’ as the source of who they experience themselves to be. It is through this tension, we argue, that we come to know that we are ageing. As we explored in earlier chapters, work on rites of passage, by early twentieth-century theorists such as Van Gennep, described the mechanisms through which individuals make transitions between social categories. Later, developed in the work of Turner, these rituals of transition — baptism, initiation, marriage, childbirth, healing and funerals — were seen as a social mechanism which could contain and control the ebb and flow of embodied human ageing. In that it threatened the continuity and therefore stability of ‘society’, the transitory nature of flesh was seen as dangerous. Much of this work on rites of passage thus emphasises the danger which the ageing person moving between social statuses, or in transition, poses — and the threats to which they are exposed.