For the past few months I've been reading various works on the social contexts of "old age" and the social worlds of "older people". It's still early days for me in terms of where I may go with all of this but I'm thinking about looking at the reading practices of older people, especially frail and less mobile people. There are some obvious links to my previous/ongoing research especially in terms of how people are classified and defined by chronological age categories as if that could explain all and every behaviour. I haven't found much research that looks at specificities of reading experiences with old/older age, although truly I haven't really launched into that lit review yet.
Yesterday, I read "Talk about Old Age, Health and Morality" by Outi Jolanki in an edited collection by Ricca Edmondson and Hans-Joachim von Kondratowitz called Valuing Older People: A Humanist Approach to Ageing. Jolanki used interview data collected from 250 people living in southern Finland who were 90 years of age or older to explore "whether and how notions of health and old age are constructed as moral matters" (p. 261). Using detailed excerpts and vignettes, Jolanki shows how when asked about their health, ageing participants "balanced" between distancing themselves from an identity as "old" and claiming one that features physcial and mental activity, as being in good health, but using old age as a way to legitimate poor health and inactivity -- in other words, they were "giving factual reports of their health but also 'performing' their identities as worthy members of society" (p. 263). Jolanki goes on to explore how the category of "old" functions as a "restrictive definition" for many participants. Citing Featherstone and Hepworth (1995), Jolanki writes, "...being able to control oneself cognitively, bodily and emotionally is required to achieve the status of adult; conversely, losing bodily control and cognitive skills produces the danger of social unacceptability and losing that status. As a result of the latter, older people might not be the object of moral reprehension, but they might well be assigned a childlike, patronised status" (p. 269). Even more interesting, are Jolanki's claims that "wisdom discourse" (i.e., "old age as a time of mental development and increased understanding of life" consituted "weak discourse" -- requiring a lot of rhetorical support to answer doubts and skepticism. Given the dominance of the "activity discourse" the author cautions against imposing all moral responsibility on the individual whose life choices are seen as determining if they are "active" and ageing well. Jolanki ends with a suggestion that "to study the ways that older people themselves address the idea of wisdom and life experience in their everyday lives could illuminate different meanings of wisdom, both as an individual quality and in terms of its social ramifications".
This essay gave me lots to think about (they all do...) especially wondering about the role that reading (or listening or being read to) might play, how that role has changed for those who have done it earlier in their lives. Also thinking about the public library, its services and how library discourses tie into Jolanki's themes. I'll be reading Elfreda Chatman again in the next little while...
