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5. Aging and Narrative Identities
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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5 Aging and Narrative Identities The river of time is a river sweeping its banks along with it. ROBERT MUSIL, THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES Introduction In late modern societies people are called “aged” as soon as their chronometric age reaches a certain mark. This may be the official retirement age or the age at which the organizations that serve the interests of older people, such as the AARP or its European counterparts, announce the onset of aging, usually at the age of fifty. To assess whether individuals are still normal adults or already “aged,” the chronocratic culture demands to know the year of birth, but this hard fact can only serve its purpose if it is implicitly loaded with generalizing images and prejudices. To say that somebody is 48, 57, 68, or 82 can only be seen as informative if one draws on a certain construction of the life course in which ages are connected with assumptions about characteristics of persons. Such assumptions are usually related to narratives about the life course. What are the consequences of such chronometrically ascribed identities for the ways persons see themselves? In other words, for their personal identities? Are “normal” people suddenly overtaken by a new collective identity when the clock ticks them out of normal adulthood? Will there be repeated shifts into yet another, still “older” identity when they become 85+ or 100+? Or is U V 170 Aging and the Art of Living the self ageless (Kaufman 1986)? Do aging persons remain who they were, even during relatively long lives? Is it possible to support personal identities of aging persons in such a way that they are better able to deal with generalizing “cultural macro-narratives” (Baars 2010)? How can we do more justice to aging persons? In scientific studies of adult aging, the research aims at explaining how certain characteristics such as income, health, or well-being evolve and change over time. Remarkably, such characteristics are distinguished from the identities of the persons who form the research populations. Somehow, their identities are supposed to form a continuous background; if not, we would speak, not of change or aging, but of two or more different persons. This implicit “background identity” presupposes that aging persons form a continuous , unchanging background of the search for specific changes in biological, psychological, or social variables—mostly in disciplines not related to each other—although the sheer amount of change in such variables over a lifetime undermines the idea of such a simple continuity. Indeed, it is not easy to grasp the complexity of aging identities, which may be one of the reasons that agerelated generalizations are so popular. In the context of scientific research, background identities tend to be empty references to specific respondents: mere identifications. This fits well into the culture of late modern societies, where questions of “identity” are drastically simplified and “solved” by methods of identification that are legitimated by nation states, providing their citizens with identity cards and listing them in the data banks from which large-scale empirical studies usually derive their research populations. While traditional methods to assess the identity of a person focused on directly visible characteristics such as height, face, and color of the eyes and hair, the possibilities for changing such characteristics have made identification more abstract. Now it focuses on characteristics that can only be verified by expert technology such as fingerprints, iris pattern, or DNA. Even when a person changes his or her appearance completely, including a change of sex, this will not affect this identification. Whereas philosophers and theologians have thought for ages that there is a meaningful and unique human essence behind appearances, this essence has evaporated in the bureaucracies that keep track of individuals through their numbered identities, such as social security numbers, instead of their names. As is so often true, exact procedures are gained at the expense of meaningful content: these methods of identification address technically identifiable bodies and not personal identi- [44.203.235.24] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:26 GMT) Aging and Narrative Identities 171 ties. Therefore, these advanced technological methods represent not the end but the beginning of a more thorough questioning of what a personal identity might be, without assuming that this identity remains static over time. Sometimes it seems clear that we change, but do we really change? At other times it appears that we remain the same persons as...