Ageing Selves and Everyday Life in Ni CB - (New Ethnographies) by Cathrine Degnen (Hardcover)

About the Book

Seeking to better understand what it means to grow older in contemporary Britain from the perspective of older people themselves, this richly detailed ethnographic study engages in debates over selfhood and people's relationships with time.

Book Synopsis

Seeking to explore what it means to grow older in contemporary Britain from the perspective of older people themselves, this richly detailed ethnographic study engages in debates over selfhood and people's relationships with time. Based on research conducted in a former coal mining village in South Yorkshire, England, Cathrine Degnen explores how the category of 'old age' comes to be assigned and experienced in everyday life through multiple registers of interaction, including that of social memory, in a postindustrial context of great social transformation. Challenging both the notion of a homogenous relationship with time across generations and the idea of a universalised middle-aged self, Degnen argues that the complex interplay of social, cultural and physical attributes of ageing means that older people can come to have a different position in relation to time and to the self than younger people, unseating normative conventions about narrative and temporality.

From the Back Cover

Seeking to better understand what it means to grow older in contemporary Britain from the perspective of older people themselves, this richly detailed ethnographic study engages in debates over selfhood and people's relationships with time. Based on research conducted in an English former coal mining village, Cathrine Degnen focuses on the everyday experiences of older people living there. She explores how the category of old age comes to be assigned and experienced in daily life through multiple registers of interaction. These include 'memory work' about people, places and webs of relations in a postindustrial setting that has undergone profound social transformation. Challenging both the notion of a homogenous relationship with time across generations and the idea of a universalised middle-aged self, Degnen argues that the complex interplay of social, cultural and physical attributes of ageing means that older people can come to occupy a different position in relation to time and to the self than younger people. Degnen's account provides fascinating insight into what is at stake for the ageing self in regards to how people come to know, experience and dwell in the world. She describes the ways in which these distinctive forms of temporality and narrativity also come to be used against older people, denigrated socially in some contexts as 'less-than-fully adult'. This text will be of great interest to researchers and students in anthropology, sociology, human geography and social gerontology interested in selfhood, time, memory, the anthropology of Britain and the lived experience of social change.

Review Quotes

There is much to be learnt from this in-depth and extensive ethnographic research: about how older people make sense of, and talk about, the situations in which they find themselves in later life. Degnen's sensitive and thought-provoking ethnography has a moral as well as analytical valency and makes a valuable contribution to this literature.

About the Author

Cathrine Degnen is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Newcastle University