Against the backdrop of demographic change and its effects on our everyday lives, social and cultural anthropology is increasingly paying attention to the specific ways in which people grow old(er). Anthropological ageing research thereby places the subject at the centre, aiming to understand the manifold experiences of old(er) age as a subjective process, as identity and as practice (Brosius and Mandoki 2020; Götz and Rau 2017). These experiences of one's own or other peoples’ age(ing) are significantly shaped by materialities, such as ageing bodies, ‘age-appropriate’ clothing, furniture, ‘age-friendly’ spaces, and technological devices such as assistive technology (Laviolette and Hanson 2007).
However, despite various anthropological traditions in material culture studies (Hahn 2005; Miller 1998; Warnier 2001), the materialities of age and ageing tend to be neglected in anthropological age studies. Thus, this special issue sets out to strengthen a research perspective that takes the co-constitutive entanglement of the material-objective and personal-subjective dimensions of age(ing) seriously. It discusses theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches, as well as insights in this field.
To do so, we introduce, discuss and exemplify material ageing studies (MAS), a research perspective located at the intersection of cultural anthropology, the sociology of ageing, science and technology studies (STS) and environmental, cultural and critical gerontology. This perspective is inspired by the material turn in the social sciences and humanities that has (re)directed attention to the material dimension and the ‘nonhuman actors’ that co-constitute the social world. From an MAS perspective, ageing processes are co-constituted in a nexus of discursive-material practices. This implies acknowledging that ageing itself is not an attribute of a human being, but emerges as a phenomenon through the entanglement of diverse materialities, practices, discourses and subjectivities. The process of ageing is therefore not only a biological, but a symbolic, discursive, cultural and – most importantly – material phenomenon (Wanka and Gallistl 2018), in which a variety of human and nonhuman actors are entangled (Höppner and Urban 2018). Ageing is understood as distributed (Höppner 2021), as an assemblage of materialities: from human bodies, things and technologies to spaces and their relations (Gallistl and Wanka 2021).
MAS is thus concerned with the co-constitution of materialities and age(ing), as well as older adults’ positions, practices and perceptions in and of materialities. Research in this field focuses, for example, on the roles of objects, artefacts, things, technologies, spaces, architectures and bodies in the diverse experiences of ageing (Buse and Twigg 2018; Depner 2015; Endter 2020; Gallistl and Wanka 2019). These studies acknowledge the role of materialities and the ways that they shape our experiences of ageing, which bears great analytical potential for contemporary anthropological debates and links to already established fields like material culture studies, gender studies and STS. Moreover, age and ageing exemplify present and future arenas of socio-material entanglements in and through time and space: for example, the digitisation of the everyday life of the elderly, and also the growth of mobile and e-health applications for older people, which give some insight into what is and will be possible.
To further investigate how the material, tangible world around us shapes the lived realities, experiences and perceptions of ageing in particular, we have curated a range of articles that focus on bodies, things, places and affects in the practices of doing age and ageing. The studies we bring together in this special issue investigate how meaning and meaningfulness are materially constituted and emplaced through materiality; how the home represents a specific material site that shapes ageing experiences, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic; how embodied and sensory experiences co-constitute life in older peoples’ homes; and how materiality is linked to affects among older adults living in digitalised environments.
Methods and Insights in the Materialities of Age and Ageing
To study the socio-material co-constitution of age(ing) from a (new) materialist perspective is to direct the lens away from age as a clearly delineated phase of life – one that begins at age 60 and ends at death – towards the relational constitution of age in, for example, material-discursive practices. Such a perspective underlines the idea of age and ageing as a material-discursive transitional phenomenon. Empirically, material aspects of age and ageing have mainly played a role in cultural studies of ageing in terms of bodies, spaces and things.
A special role within cultural studies of ageing is played by the examination of the ageing body. Here, works of critical gerontology especially emphasise the ways that the ageing body becomes the object of moral imperatives of a successful and active age(ing) (e.g. Katz 1997, 2000, 2013, 2015; Tulle 2008, 2015, 2012; Calasanti 2006; Öberg 1996; Gilleard and Higgs 2011, 2013). From this perspective, the body can, on the one hand, be understood as a ‘corporeal object’ to which practices of attribution, addressing and staging transition processes are directed. For instance, when a body goes through physical changes (such as losing teeth or changes in motoric competences or mobility) it might be addressed as fit, attractive, frail or care-dependent, thus initiating (institutionally regulated) transition processes, like relocation to a nursing home. In this context, the material agency of the ageing body increasingly comes into view. The body becomes the object of a wide variety of socio-material practices that aim to prevent, or at least delay, the ageing process. Larissa Pfaller (2016) shows how, in the context of anti-ageing, the body becomes a laboratory of age-prevention work, which is no longer solely about work on the body, but about work with and in it, involving a wide variety of material agents such as hormone cures, fitness equipment, food or medical diagnostic procedures. For their part, Sandberg and Marshall (2017) add the gender dimension to this intersectionality of body and age.
From a materiality lens, this ‘transition-initiating function’ of bodies is not limited to the older individual, but also involves other bodies to which they are in relation: the transition to grandparenthood is initiated by the pregnancy, as a bodily change, of a child; the bereavement transition is initiated when a spouse's body becomes terminally ill. On the other hand, the body is the main material through which transition processes are subjectively, affectively and sensually experienced and incorporated. For example, experiences of loss, like bereavement, are sensually perceived as inducing feelings of pain and loneliness, but also freedom (Hockey et al. 2001). Furthermore, from a life course perspective, the body functions as a ‘storehouse’ of transitional experiences and knowledge. Thus, following Pierre Bourdieu (1980) and his theory of habitus, we take via the concept of the ‘hexis’ that what the body has learned is not possessed as a knowledge that can be looked at again, but is embodied in one's entire being. For example, the body may be conceived as old when it bears marks and traces from former transitions like pregnancies, illnesses and recoveries. It is thus both the medium of ageing experiences and constituted in ageing processes. Bodies thereby link temporalities of the past, present and future, as well as the life courses of a variety of people, showing what ‘distributed ageing’ can mean (Höppner 2021).
A second material dimension relevant in researching age and ageing is things. Things are often regarded as material representations of age, such as memory media, clothes or everyday objects. Things, understood as nonhuman artefacts, produced by humans and integrated into contexts of use, appear ageless at first glance. One could say that their attraction lies precisely in their promise not to age. Simultaneously, things are signifiers of ageing. In this context, the empirical cultural scientists Gudrun M. König and Zuzanna Papierz (2013: 294) point out that things always contain different meanings: ‘They are polyvalent, that is, they carry within them partly convergent and partly divergent connotations, which come into play contextually.’
It becomes clear that things are also transitional phenomena, ageing in their own kind of material transition. Here a praxeological perspective can be helpful. This assumes the ageing of things not only in analogy to the ageing of people as a social construction, but as an ageing that is first produced in action and thus in use – a ‘doing’ in the age of things. As Ekerdt and Baker (2014) claim, there is a life course dimension to things, and vice versa. One can therefore argue that there is a material or ‘thing’ dimension to life courses and all their transitions. Ekerdt and Baker call the changes in size and composition of the material possessions that people accumulate and get rid of across their life courses a ‘material convoy’. With the notion of a ‘convoy’, they not only refer to Kahn's and Antonucci's model of a ‘social convoy’ (1980), which supports coping with critical life events, but also evoke the image of a second layer around the human body. Thus, this enables us to view materialities in life course transitions as gradual and not categorical. The socio-material interplay between age and things has so far already been considered, for example, in the work of Julia Twigg (1997, 2007, 2010), who makes the relationship between clothing and age the subject of her research, and conceives clothing as a materiality actively involved in signifying age.
Anamaria Depner also highlights the importance of things for older people in her work when she shows the role that personal and mundane things play in moving to a retirement home (Depner 2015) or into elderly care (Depner 2017). Artner et al. (2017; Atzl and Artner 2019) to work out the ways that things are involved in the production of care and in care practices, approaching the materiality of care both historically and empirically. The economic role that things play in the subjective experience of precarity and individual coping with old-age poverty is set out by Götz (2019), whose work also addresses the intersectionality of materiality, age and gender. The work of Endter and Kienitz (2017) takes a perspective directed at the agency of the materiality of things in elaborating the ways that the perception of the body as vulnerable and old changes through interaction with material things.
Technologies represent specific kinds of ‘things’ that have recently gained particular relevance in gerontology. In her ethnographic study of a home emergency call, Carolin Kollewe (2017) shows how the experience of security (through the call) is simultaneously accompanied by the experience of insecurity (through the same), and how older users develop practices for coping with insecurity. Mona Urban (2017, 2019) makes the normativity of technical assistance systems visible in her work when she describes how, for example, smart bed sensors influence the sexual activity of older people. Cordula Endter (2016, 2018, 2021) shows the consequences that the insufficient participation of older people in technological development has for the age-appropriate development of these technologies and the ways that deficit-oriented images of age already determine funding programmes in the context of technological innovation for older people. Anna Wanka and Vera Gallistl (2018; Gallistl et al. 2020) analyse the co-constitution of age(ing) and digitalisation, exploring the roles of policy, funding, research and development of new technologies on images and experiences of age(ing), and the ways that persons subjectivate themselves as ‘old’ through the use, or non-use, of digital devices.
These works not only refer to the significance of things in everyday life and in the care of older people, but also make clear that material objects themselves are involved in the production of everyday life and older people's care. They consider the interplay of body, age and technology beyond boundary-drawing, subject–object dichotomies and instead emphasise the socio-material interconnectedness of these phenomena. Such an understanding goes beyond a symbolic or objective conception of materiality. Accordingly, the agency of things and the socio-material practices carried out with them, in which phenomena such as age or gender are constituted, come into view. Newer materiality-theoretical approaches play a central role in considering this interconnectedness.
Third and finally, spaces and places form a crucial dimension of the materialities of age and ageing. Places, like bodies, are the sites where ageing takes place. The home, for example, is a space in which many life course transitions take place, and in which they materialise: for example, when people spend much more time at home after retiring or when the home suddenly becomes less densely populated when a spouse dies. Similarly to bodies, spaces like the home, but also offices, might work as ‘storehouses’ that maintain the memories of past transitions, as exemplified by furniture or photographs, but also by architecture itself.
In their article ‘Landscapes of Loss’, Jenny Hockey et al. (2001) describe in detail the ways that people who experience bereavement refurbish their homes. Whereas some deliberately keep materialised memories in their living space (like pictures), we also learn that mourning even pushes others to relocate in the course of the transition, occasionally moving closer to the cemetery where their late spouse is buried. Similar processes are described by Tarrant (2016), focusing on the transition to grandparenthood, in which homes are adjusted to grandchildren's needs or grandparents move closer to their children to take on a more active grandparenting role. Through these examples, we again see that spaces link transitions of different persons, as bodies do. Thus, the materiality of space, like the materiality of bodies, links temporalities of the past, the present and the future.
In addition, there are also specific places, described by Foucault (1966) as ‘heterotopias’, that appear as multilayered spaces when we look at ageing processes and phenomena from an MAS perspective. Hospitals or nursing homes might be such places, in which contexts of living, working and dying often intersect. Atzl and Depner (2017), for instance, investigate how privacy and professionalism intersect in nursing homes, which are private spaces of living and at the same time institutionalised workplaces. Here, spatial interference is marked by objects such as photographs, home textiles and other private items, on the one hand, and nursing instruments, fall-protection mats and patient lifters on the other. Two different spaces emerge in the same place through relevant objects, bodies and practices. In the context of ageing and migration, multi-spatial places can also occur in the realising of cultural belonging, and as mobility becomes a challenge, they can be mediated through digital technologies such as smartphones or manifest in virtual spaces.
In summary, ageing manifests in bodies, spaces and things, and at the same time, materialities can be agential in ageing processes and experiences of ageing. This is what we mean by the co-constitution of ageing and materialities.
The Contributions in the Special Issue
It is the interplay, the (re)configuration of spaces and (their) things, in which the everyday, which cultural anthropology seeks to capture, takes place. Being at home in a place, a city, a flat, relocating, emigrating and moving around always take place in spaces, with things, and through the appropriation of both. At the same time, they take place in a dimension of (one's own) temporality, in the course of life and in growing older. Here we see the obvious interfaces between an ageing studies and a cultural anthropological perspective on people, things and spaces very clearly. This special issue therefore takes the promising step of thinking together material configurations such as different spaces and things, human bodies, and temporally conditioned changes and transitions.
While in gerontology, and here specifically in ecological gerontology, questions have repeatedly been asked about what age(ing)-friendly environments, neighbourhoods, cities and dwellings should look like, an anthropologically oriented, material ageing studies perspective would first put the question of what constitutes ‘at home’ in the sense of a feeling. How do people who move in old age – whether to another flat or to another country – make this new place a ‘home’ for themselves, and how do they deal with the moments and areas of everyday life in which they do not succeed? And what about the negotiations between spaces, things and bodies when people do not want to leave their homes, even though from the outside, this would appear to be a way to better cope with personal transitions over time? How can these transitions of ageing in one's own spaces be given depth of meaning with the help of things?
In her article ‘Narratives of ageing and materiality: the embodied life course and experiences of home in older people's residential care’, Melanie Lovatt approaches these questions by exploring feelings of (not) being at home in residential care. Drawing on ethnographic research, she argues that residents’ feelings about (not) being or becoming at home are shaped by the embodied and socio-material interactions they have previously experienced throughout their lives. In doing so, she brings together material ageing studies and life course research and adapts the concept of the embodied life course (Marshall and Katz 2012), which can help us understand how residents’ encounters with their material surroundings change over time and inform their current experiences of home after relocation transitions.
In her article ‘My Home is My Castle/My Home is My Prison’, Anna Wanka also focuses on the home as central site for the co-constitution of ageing and materialities in transitions. Instead of looking at the transition to residential care homes, however, she follows privately dwelling adults and their transition to retirement. She thereby traces home transformations along three lines of inquiry: meanings, practices and negotiations of, as well as within, the home (for example, between retiring partners living together). The paper proposes a ‘doing’ approach to life course transitions, one that focuses on socio-material practices. It thus offers a prominent place in transition research to spatiality, materiality and processuality.
In their article ‘Micro-Practices of Domestic Living. The Self-Care of Older Women in Precarious Circumstances’, Irene Götz and Petra Schweiger focus on the self-care routines developed by retired women in precarious living situations, and on how these routines assemble mental strategies and attitudes, bodily practices and socio-material techniques integrated into specific spatial settings. Drawing on ethnographic case studies, their article contributes to material ageing studies by delving into precarious lifeworlds and considering social inequalities in the context of the study of materialities.
In her article ‘The Body as the Affective Materiality of Ageing in a Future City’, Tiina Suopajärvi approaches bodies, affects and spaces of ageing from a new materialist perspective. She shows how, in participatory research processes, feminist new materialism and affect theory can be combined and reflected, and thus presents ageing as a process co-constituted by moving human and nonhuman materiality. Here we see how ageing bodies form assemblages with nonhuman materiality to gain access to the city and thus become actors in the urban space, and which (material) barriers prevent such assemblages from becoming part of the city. These practices – as well as their absence – are embedded in affects, and so is imagining a more digitalised urban environment. Analysing her data from four workshops in Oulu, the author argues that the ageing body is an affective materiality that must be considered when designing a future (smart) city. With a deep understanding of practically oriented ethnography, she also shows the potential of participatory research and materiality-based investigations.
The meaningfulness of material-person-relations is investigated in the article ‘A Sensory Gaze into Embodied, Material and Emplaced Meanings Midlife Experience of Creative Leisure Occupations’ by Tamar Amiri-Savitzky, Merel Visse, Ton Satink and Aagje Swinnen. By merging sensory ethnography with interviews and participant observation, they bring the interplay of tangible and intangible knowledge, practice and experience into sight. In this way, they follow three women in midlife in their crafting-related leisure practices to understand how meaning is co-constituted in these interplays of bodies, materialities, practices and spaces. The relational entanglements that become visible in the ethnographic description turn into spaces of value, meaning and reflexivity in which the three women negotiate their own age and its significance. The ways in which they care for themselves and deal with decay and finiteness, and the experience of their own bodies though artistic activity, all testify to the significance of materiality as a metaphysical space of experience of subjectivity, temporality and existence, and at the same time make clear how insignificant things become highly significant when used.
Fields of Further Endeavour
This special issue of AJEC has set out to investigate how the material, tangible world around us shapes the lived realities, experiences and perceptions of ageing. To do so, we have curated a range of articles that not only present exciting empirical insights on bodies, things, places and affects in the practices of doing age and ageing, they also point to future fields of endeavour. They do so particularly by making connections to research fields in which materiality has not yet played a major role. Melanie Lovatt's article makes a case for the relevance of materiality in life course transitions and thus expands our horizon towards (new) materialist life course research. Irene Götz and Petra Schweiger combine a focus on everyday materialities and practices with a lens on precariousness in later life, arguing for social inequalities research that is sensitive to material matters not only in the economic sense, but also in the tangible sense. Tiina Suopajärvi brings affects, materialities and ageing bodies into urban studies and urban planning research and argues for materiality-based investigations in those fields. And finally, Tamar Amiri-Savitzky et al. discuss, inter alia, methodological issues and approaches in material ageing studies. All of these pose possibilities and new fields of endeavour for the future of anthropological ageing studies.
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