Elders

Humans are the primate species with not only the longest life span (120 years) but also the greatest proportion of those years spent in social and biological maturity. The evolutionary legacy of aging also includes a powerful biological dimension of programmed senescence. Despite this, cross-cultural psychiatrist David Gutmann suggests elders exist not because of our species' technical ability to keep the weak alive; instead, we attained our humanity through the very existence of elders and the significance of their postparental roles.

The simplest way of conceptualizing elders and elderhood is as the age cohort relatively older than yourself or the generation with more years than anyone else in the community. Cultural construction of this older-adult category typically combines the path of biological maturity, the developmental kinship and family cycle, and broader notions of social generation. Elderhood more often than not focuses on the latter two factors, although for women, menopause can function as an important status-turning point, signaling eligibility for elder status. However, as Rasmussen notes for the Tuareg, the ending of reproductive capacity complexly impacts the unfolding of female person-hood through realignment of kin hierarchies and other social strata affecting both males and females.

In essence, cultures are more apt to see elderhood as a marker of a social rather than a biological or time-based maturity. This is clear when we see persons, especially males, enter the beginning ranks of elder in their late 20s and early 30s among Africa's age set societies as well as in Australian Aboriginal tribes. From another perspective, an abundance of years without the culturally prescribed markers may allow individuals never to be socially considered an elder. For example, in Peterson's study of African American working-class women in Seattle, she found that female elders were designated by the word “wise,” a term given to women who have not only borne children, but have raised kids who, in turn, have their own offspring. In this community, the label “wise” could be attained while a woman was in her late 30s. However, females who might be in their eighth decade of life but had not accomplished the required social tasks of maturity would be considered in the same generation as teenagers.

Age along with gender and kin relations stand as the three universal bedrocks of how all human societies construct a framework of social order and biocultural succession. Passage of human populations through the life span is translated into notions of social time, created by transit through successive age-based statuses marking the cultural mapping of the life cycle. Linguistic variants of child, adult, and elder become social boundaries in virtually all societies, marked by such things as variations in dress, comportment, modes of speech, and deferential gestures. Sometimes, actual physical boundaries can be involved, such as in the traditional Irish peasant pattern of moving elders into the sacred west room of the house, where younger kin could not enter without permission. An even more dramatic and negative case is that [Page 807]of the Fulani, West African pastoralists. Here, after a couple's last child has wed, the elders are regarded as socially dead. They live as dependents of their oldest son, moving separately to different outer edges of his house compound, symbolically residing over their future grave sites.

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