Ageing in Everyday Life

Materialities and Embodiments

Katz, Stephen

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781447335931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gerontology
• Index: Social Sciences

Applying interdisciplinary perspectives about everyday life to vital issues in the lives of older people, this book maps together the often taken-for-granted aspects of what it means to age in an ageist society. Part of the Ageing in a Global Context series, the two parts address the materialities and the embodiments of everyday life respectively. Topics covered include household possessions, public and private spaces, older drivers, media representations, dementia care, health-tracking, dress and sexuality. This focus on micro-sociological conditions allows us to rethink key questions which have shaped debates in the social aspects of ageing. International contributions, including from the UK, USA, Sweden and Canada, provide a critical guide to inform thinking and planning our ageing futures.

Part 1

Materialities

Part 1: introduction

Stephen Katz

In a previous project on Canadian 'snowbird' culture, I interviewed retired Canadians at their winter retirement residences in Florida, where they spend up to six months of the year escaping Canadian winters (Katz, 2005). It was an enlightening experience, not only for learning about residents' backgrounds and life plans, but also about how they organised and negotiated their movements between two countries, climates, cultures and homes. Our meetings in Florida usually began with a home tour, as the residents proudly pointed out which cherished objects, mementos, gifts and photographs they chose to bring with them from Canada and what special memories and personal stories each evoked. Walking with the residents through their gardens was also a chance for me to see how they personalised their outdoor spaces to express their lives in Florida as both rooted and temporary. Aside from the interviews, I found that the world of snowbirds was brought to life through its rhythms and motions, where 'home' could include several familiar places between 'here' and 'there', along with the nomadic excursions between them. While gerontology has always had a strong commitment to environmental 'person-fit' and 'ageing-in-place' research, such research prioritises health-related problems of housing modification and design, residential displacement and relocation, and community care resources. The mobility of snowbirds poses something different, because it raises new questions about the relationships between biography, place, flow and settlement and their materialities. Things such as vehicles, plants, kitchen items, medicines, clothing, pictures and books were important conveyers of such relationships, as were virtual connectivity and social media, international newspapers, foods, recreational centres, healthcare services and volunteer organisations. Hence, in hindsight this research project was an education in material culture, as a realm of use and consumption, and as one of lived and symbolic significance. As such, it inspires this part of the book on ageing and materialities.

Material culture and the materialities of social worlds are familiar themes in European and American everyday sociologies; however, their application of material analyses to ageing and later life has been wanting. Thus, the idea of materialities in this part of the book serves as a conceptual starting point for understanding how specific experiences and identities of older people are grounded in their material contexts. The chapters that follow, on possessions, nursing homes, ageing movement-space, film and print media, are examples of how, where and why the materialities associated with the ageing process intensify and become meaningful and distinct. This part of the book also parallels research on material and relational existence emerging in other theoretical areas about 'post-qualitative inquiry' (St. Pierre, 2011), 'non-representational ethnography' (Vannini, 2015), 'post-human' feminism (Bradiotti, 2013), the 'new materialism' (Fox and Alldred, 2017; Fullagar, 2017) and the 'affective turn' in social theory (Gregg and Seaworthy, 2010; Sointu, 2016). However, little of it has been borrowed by research on ageing, with some exceptions that investigate the materialisation of memories (for example, Buse and Twigg, 2015) and non-representational approaches to health (Andrews, 2014; Chapter Four in this volume) and in British research networks on the materialities of care (http://materialitiesofcare.co.uk) and the Hair and Care project (for people with dementia) (https://thehairandcareproject.wordpress.com). Thus, under the banner of materialities, the chapters in this part of the book point to exciting future opportunities to encompass these new directions and further draw out our thinking about and methodological approaches to the material relationships that connect ageing individuals to their environments, spaces, things, technologies and rhythms of life.

References

Andrews, G.J. (2014) 'Co-creating health's lively, moving frontiers: brief observations on the facets and possibilities of non-representational theory', Health & Place, vol 30, pp 165–70.

Braidotti, R. (2013) The posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Buse, C. and Twigg, J. (2015) 'Materialising memories: exploring the stories of people with dementia through dress', Ageing & Society, vol 36, pp 1115–35.

Fox, N. and Alldred, P. (2017) Sociology and the new materialism, London: Sage Publications.

Fullagar, S. (2017) 'Post-qualitative inquiry and the new materialist turn: implications for sport, health and physical culture research', Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, vol 9, no 2, pp 247–57.

Gregg, M. and Seaworthy, G.J. (eds) (2010) The affect theory reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Katz, S. (2005) 'Spaces of age, snowbirds and the gerontology of mobility', in S. Katz (ed) Cultural aging: Life course, lifestyle and senior worlds, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, pp 202–31.

Sointu, E. (2016) 'Discourse, affect and affliction', The Sociological Review, vol 64, pp 312–28.

St. Pierre, E.A. (2011) 'Post qualitative research: the critique and the coming after', in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds) Sage handbook of qualitative inquiry (4th edn), Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, pp 611–35.

Vannini, P. (2015) 'Non-representational ethnography: new ways of animating lifeworlds', Cultural Geographies, vol 22, no 2, pp 317–27.

TWO

Things and possessions

David J. Ekerdt

Introduction

The life course is commonly charted by intangibles, as a progression of roles, statuses, relationships, emotions, identities and levels of wellbeing. And these occur within even larger constructs that we call social institutions (such as work, family, fashion, education, economy). These intangibles nonetheless have real force and real consequences. Yet the life course also has a physical, material reality: it is enacted and embodied with things, it proceeds in the service of things, and the passage of time propels people towards the consumption of things. These are not only the objects and furnishings of everyday life that are held by oneself or others, but also public affordances, infrastructures and landscapes.

To propose that the life course is enacted by things is to claim that this material is something more than mere contexts, instruments, adjuncts or accessories. Childhood is unthinkable without toys, just as adulthood is unthinkable without keys. People's belongings manage age-appropriate presentations of themselves: in their bodies, in their social roles, in their homemaking, at leisure. For example, 'parenthood' is an abstraction until made concrete by acts that maintain a physical environment for children and continually furnish it with goods for daily needs. Material resources are deployed in order to be someone, whatever that station in life may call for. Material resources spin a story about the self and are the means by which to evaluate how well life is going. Wrote Sartre: 'The totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I have' (1956, p 591).

Although eclipsed by a frequent emphasis on roles, relationships and especially health, research on later life has not overlooked material culture. For example, there has been considerable attention to the built environment (Golant, 2015), to the places where elders reside in rooms, buildings and neighbourhoods, even including outdoor places such as gardens (Milligan and Bingley, 2015). Assistive devices for health and self-care are an important focus of geriatrics. Elders' interactions with consumer electronics (so-called 'tech') is an active area of research (Fisk et al, 2009). Selected categories of objects have come in for study, for example, in this volume, clothing and automobiles (see Chapters Eight and Ten). Public amenities and attractions may also have significance in later life, such as museum objects (Jacques, 2007).

This chapter considers in a comprehensive way the innumerable objects that furnish daily life, theorising them as a material convoy accommodated across the life course. For older adults there are additional considerations about the convoy: its volume, manageability and a growing, shared concern about its disposition. The chapter moves on to review evidence about age and the changing meanings of possessions and finally proposes that the convoy can have a material agency apart from the subjectivity of its possessors. This argument is an attempt to adjust the view of possessions primarily as serving self and identity, their main drawback being lax management of their volume. Rather, the confederated contents of the household can be the origin of an insistent, problematic materiality that exceeds human intention. All by themselves, possessions have the capacity to surprise. Throughout, the chapter draws on interview studies with older adults in the United States about their possessions and experience with household divestment, as well as survey responses from the 2010 wave of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a biennial panel study of a representative sample of older Americans (http://hrsonline.isr.umich.edu).

A material convoy

Across the great range of objects that actualise the life course, possessions have the most scope for individual initiative, but they also require considerable responsibility on their behalf. Possessions are the material things that reside with people and stay long enough to merit some care or placement. The role of possessions in later life can be taken up category by category, but there is a way to attend to possessions in their totality and across time, using the metaphor of the 'convoy'. It affords a whole-life, whole-house handle on age and materiality.

Kahn and Antonucci (1980) applied the convoy metaphor to describe a 'convoy model of social relations', a changeable structure of social ties that accompanies one from birth to death. 'Individuals are conceptualized as part of a dynamic network or convoy that moves with them through time, space, and the life course' (Antonucci et al, 2011, p 161). The convoy of social relations – family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances – can protect and gratify individuals but also put them at risk. Potentially, the social convoy can provision the life course with support or with stress, or both.

With a nod to this previous work, my colleagues and I have proposed that life-course studies can take a 'material turn' (Smith and Ekerdt, 2011; Ekerdt and Baker, 2014; Ekerdt, 2015). Akin to the social convoy, the body of one's possessions across time is a convoy of material support. Like the social convoy, the material convoy has members that are more important and less important (some even forgotten), members that endure and are transient, and members that also populate the convoys of others. The material convoy undergoes predictable age-linked changes (for example, expansion in early adulthood). People develop affective and affirmative relations with their things: they want to give them a good home, or they cannot stand to look at them. Like the social convoy, parts of the material convoy are maintained for their actual or potential supportiveness, but a larger convoy does not necessarily guarantee more benefit. Social networks and material convoys share one other feature: the person at their centre may regard the constituents with ambivalence (Fingerman and Hay, 2004). The stock and store of one's belongings can be a resource, an achievement, a delight and a comfort, but they may also by turns be a burden.

The material convoy, then, is a wide frame for considering the question of ageing and possessions: a persistent but dynamic body of belongings that accompanies people across their changing lives. Things may come and go, but there is always a convoy.

The convoy in later life

The material convoy has at least three added characteristics in later life. First, after decades of consumption, it is an accumulation of things that have endured, that have been retained throughout the rhythms of acquisition and disposal that are normal in everyday life.

Advancing age lays down a residue of belongings that become biographically meaningful by virtue of their duration. If a household has already moved once or twice in retirement, the remaining property is even more selected. Excess furniture and clothing may be sloughed off, but such items as photograph albums and mementos of one's parents remain. The volume of possessions is not necessarily larger than in middle age (there is no feasible technique by which to measure this anyway), but the concentration of 'sticky' things rises in the convoy.

The keeping of things comes about in opposed ways. There is intentional keeping that arises from an array of motives that can shift and recombine even in relation to the same object (Ekerdt et al, 2004). People keep things that are thought to be useful, have monetary value, give pleasure, symbolise oneself past and present, honour ancestors ('family things') or must be respected as gifts. People keep things because it is a virtue not to waste or trash belongings that could be used by others (Gregson, 2007), and they also keep them because they simply have the room. As adults mature, they can typically afford larger dwellings that are essentially larger containers for goods. "Have you ever known anyone to have an empty closet?", asked one of our interviewees. "Drawers and cupboards are for filling up," said another.

There is also inadvertent keeping – accumulation through mundane neglect. It arises from the housekeeping practice of putting things away in 'backstage' areas of the home (Arnold et al, 2012; Hirschman et al, 2012). Homes have public and private spaces, visible and hidden spaces, and one kind of space actually makes the other possible. People 'stage' their homes to be presentable for themselves and others by tidying up and putting things away into the recesses. They also store things that are intended for transfer to others (eventually) or disposal (eventually). Habits of replacement consumption without disposal (for example, appliances) contribute to the crowding of cellars, garages and sheds. And in these places that occupy the margins or edges of living spaces, things can be forgotten. 'Things are there but they are not visible. They can be retrieved at any moment, but also forgotten at will, without any regrets or remorse as long as they are not thrown away' (Korosec-Serfaty, 1984, p 313). Of course, things can be retrieved from the limbo of storage, but until then they will go unscrutinised for divestment or re-use (Gregson, 2007). So, putting things away and out of sight would ordinarily be deemed a good habit for the home. But out of sight is out of mind, and so the convoy grows.

Older adults are well aware of overfull convoys. The 2010 wave of the HRS asked this survey question: 'Thinking of the belongings that you own or are keeping at your home, do you feel that you have more things than you need, fewer things than you need, or just the right amount?'. Note that people were asked to appraise possession volume in relation to their 'need', not some external standard. Just over 60% of persons in their 60s and 70s said that they had 'more things than I need', whereas about one third claimed that they had 'just the right amount' (calculations by the author). The more-than-needed response was somewhat more moderate, 53%, among those aged 80 and over. This was still a majority of respondents and some evidence of unease about the size of the material convoy.

What are the correlates of feeling over-provisioned? Not gender – men and women answer almost identically in this respect – and not personality to any significant extent. It stands to reason that the bigger the household, the more the press of possessions, and that is borne out. Married people, with two occupants of the household and someone else to blame, are more likely to say that they have more than they need. So are homeowners (versus renters) and people in dwellings with more rooms. By asset quintiles, wealthier people are more likely to admit to having too many things – 75% saying so among the top quintile. The response about excess possessions, however, is sharply lower among persons who have moved in the past two years, probably because these relocations entailed the downsizing that is typical of moves in later life.

A second feature of the material convoy in later life is that its manageability becomes more challenging. The ability to manage convoy contents depends on one's capacity for the labour of both possession and divestment. Kept things are far more than abeyant matter resting politely by. They must be accommodated by being stored, arranged, contained, tidied, maintained, cleaned, secured, insured, provided for and worried about. Property maintenance and its costs were a considerable concern for older adult...