Age

The Social and Cultural Constructions of Age Identity

Whereas growing up or growing old are natural processes, the understanding of and reaction to these processes are not. Findings of cross-cultural research reveal that there is a great deal of variation in the way societies divide and symbolize the life course and in the role assigned to different age identities. The experience of being young or old thus varies from society to society, depending on the specific sociocultural contexts and variables such as life expectancy, kinship patterns, or ideas of personhood and independency.

For instance, sociologists and social historians agree that an elaborate notion of childhood did not exist in the Western world before the Industrial Revolution. Children had only become a differentiated social group and an object for adult intervention (by parents, the church, governments) in the 17th century. The singling out of childhood as a separate life stage was a combined effect of a series of social changes, including the rise of compulsory education, the emergence of the nuclear family (employed father, nonemployed mother, and dependent children) and advancement in technology, such as the printing press. Likewise, the forced expulsion of older people from the labor market through retirement, the emergence of pension and welfare payments, and the development of professions such as medicine, nursing, and social work over the past century have helped establish the modern category of old age as a period of social dependency. Although the disparate notions of childhood and old age are widely embraced across modern societies, they remain far from universal. Thus, the common conception of adolescence as a stage of “storm and stress” in Western societies is unfamiliar to many Eastern cultures, which perceive the transition from youth to adulthood as one continuous process. These examples of differences in perception of the life course indicate that age identity and experience are fundamentally social and cultural constructs.

To illustrate the complexity of the concept of aging, it is useful to differentiate between different types or meanings of age:

• Biological or physiological age refers to the physical aging of the human body.
• Chronological age represents the amount of time that has passed from the date of birth.
• Psychological age stands for age-related adaption capacities of an individual.
• Social age signifies norms, behavior, and attitudes conceived as appropriate for an age group.

The four types of age are separate but interrelated. Although biological processes of growing up or older are more or less universal and provide a context for sociopsychological development, these processes seldom completely determine the characteristics of psychological and social age. In reality, chronological age is open to cultural interpretations. Social practices and lifestyles also have profound impacts upon the process of physical maturity as well as definition of biological goals. Sociologists and anthropologists are particularly interested in exploring the intersection of different meanings of age and how age groups and identities [Page 16]are constituted over time. Answering these questions has profound implications for understanding how age shapes the way societies are organized and experienced.

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