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Old Age Constructions and Deconstructions. - book reviews

Age and Ageing, Jan, 1995 by Peter Laslett

This very brief little book is one more tour de force by the most penetrating and perceptive of the band of contemporary anthropologists studying old people and the social process of ageing. On this occasion Hazan, of Tel-Aviv University, has chosen elderly people in the population at large, rather than an old people's home or a day-care centre (see e.g. his best work The Limbo People, 1980). But the text consists for the most part of apophthegmatic generalizations about the topic, about the superficiality, the confusion and ineffectiveness of social theory about ageing and old people, and about the fundamentally paradoxical and inconsistent situation of these old people in the social structure.

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It is then a realist's, a pessimist's, analysis of the subject, an astringent antidote to much of the ill-judged generalization current at the present time. The construction of the various types of discourse is analysed under four heads: a social trap, a cultural trap, a personal trap and finally a 'theoretical trap: the missing language'. Each 'trap' is relentlessly deconstructed, though it is not easy to decypher quite what is meant by trap, or conveyed in the deconstruction process. Thirteen pages are presented as a conclusion on the nature of knowledge about ageing and on the aged as a symbolic type. These arguments are somewhat elusive in Hazan's complex, over-allusive language and the outcome does not seem to be particularly constructive in the common meaning of that word.

If this booklet has a leitmotiv, it is that the outlook of the old and the ideology of those who comment on them are finally and perpetually informed by the fear and rejection of death. This is a Hobbesian theme and Hazan the writer could himself be said to resemble Thomas Hobbes. The surprising thing to the present reviewer about the sombre doctrine of the work is that the sample of normal ageing consisted of the original members of the first of the British Universities of the Third Age instituted in Cambridge in the early 1980s. This organization, which now has 40 000 members and 250 'campuses', can claim to be the most optimistic and constructive of all such things now so hopefully springing into being. In an earlier version of the text communicated to me, the language and outlook of these earliest confessed 'Third Agers' of Cambridge was surveyed and criticized at some length, and of course critically demolished.

The reason why so perceptive and realistic a thinker failed to see the change in his subject matter and in the situation of his informants which was going on under his very eyes is quite easily supplied by a historical sociologist, engaged with the architecture of the new institution. In spite of his astonishing perceptiveness, he has no sense of history, of the process of social transformation, gradual and osmotic or sudden and abrupt. This want is still a frequent intellectual feature of anthropologists, and other social scientists too, in spite of their adhesion to such things as the temporal stadialism of thinkers like Marx or Freud.

These are themes too grandiose for a 'mini' review, in which it is impossible to do justice to such a book as this. We may conclude with an example of the failing I have diagnosed. Hazan proposes that the Universities of the Third Age came into being because established universities, quintessentially of the Second Age, would not admit old people to their student bodies. The facts are very different. The British unlike the continental U3As were founded outside the official university system, though willing to make use of it when they could, because they rejected the established outlook and organization. They wanted to 'construct' their own and seem to be succeeding in doing so.

PETER LASLETT Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge

Health Care Industry

Old Age Constructions and Deconstructions. - book reviews

Age and Ageing, Jan, 1995 by Peter Laslett

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