1
Processing Impasse
Abstract
Any paradigm of the supposed course of life is epoch contingent, and as such it assumes a contrived sequence of phases articulated to produce a conscripting script to a given zeitgeist. However, rather than a prescribed narrative of a set trajectory, the phases of life are constituted by an inherent tension between two wrestling epistemological visions: the one holds that the logic of some general rules regulating human nature may predict both the constancy and transitory of each life phase, while the other suggests that effervescent experientially propelled meaning bar any presaging of life phase neither by content nor by boundaries. The dialectics of this Janus faced recognition of the working of movement through life generates a series of four dilemmas that forge the cultural –academic discourse of life transitions. These are: the universal versus the diverse; the determinate versus the indeterminate; social timing versus experiential temporality and linearity versus circularity. The practical resolutions are the behavioral manifestations of what in turn is conceptualized as the life span and its passages.
Nevertheless, when no such passages could be invoked these constitutive dilemmas go astray and stop the logic of contemplating life as a discursive course. The social strategies employed to manage this impasse, otherwise known as old age, are the subject of the paper.
Key words: life course; life cycle; social time; social structure; age; construction; experience
Introdu ction
From the riddle of the sphinx to the topsy-turvy life of Scott Fitzgerald's
Benjamin Button, the course of life trajectory straddling cradle to grave and beyond, has played on human imagination as well as on the formulation of scientific paradigms. The perceptual, cultural need to encode the continuous indivisibility of experienced living into discretely identifiable units of life sets the intertwined public and academic scene that comprehends life course and aging in

2 contradictory terms of opposing outlooks. As the behavioral sciences echo the tenor of their time, the various academic approaches to the descriptive analysis of the construct, not let alone the meaning, of life must be considered in terms of their respective zeitgeists. Thus, developmental perspectives on the course of life so entrenched in contemporary therapeutic culture and in age graded institutional arrangements such as schools, are anchored in the spirit of progress embedded in modernity, while the postmodern, global specter of 'anything goes' invokes representations of effervescent, erratic, multidirectional flows in its own image.
Notwithstanding epoch related transformations in notions of the movement through life, certain persistent dilemmas could be identified as key topics that mobilize academic discourses concerning the underpinnings of life course debate. The following is set to unfold these dilemmas as a basis for offering an agenda for looking at diverse aspects of deliberating life course issues. Each dilemma profiles yet another feature in the Janus face of the concept of the life course as an architecturally constructed process on the one hand and as an experientially shaped phenomenon on the other. The interplay between these two epistemological impulses generates various dialectics of power and knowledge that embody both theoretical paradigms and their ensuing social practices.
Such cultural products could, for example, take the shape of psychosocio-biological models of benchmarks laid throughout modernity oriented preset developmental trajectories that in turn chart age biased normative maps. When this perspective is infused with the tenor of progress driven modern time, it is incarnated in the regulatory forces and ethics of age related cultures such as youth culture, midlife culture and old age culture – all embraced and governed by

3 omnipotent and uncompromising therapeutic culture.
Alternatively, cyber and cinematic society propels legitimated imagery and opportunity of transgressing otherwise sacrosanct age boundaries. This dissolution of age norms, like the collapse of gender markers, not only reshuffles the pack of life stages cards but also changes the rules of the game to the extent that being off course in terms of socially anticipated timetables, be it regressively or progressively, behind or ahead, is not considered deviant, and hence no longer sets the scene for envisioning and affirming the correct passage of life. Thus, a confluence of two states of the matter is implausibly concocted. That is a conjunction of quiddity of essential numbers and their subsequent solid bureaucratic thresholds alongside liquidity in its manifold constructible ever increasing circles of meanings and forms. This dialectical union renders nowadays age-riddled culture both insoluble and soluble at once.
Since culture in its broadest sense is at the core, and no specific discipline or method could account for the omnipresence and pervasiveness of age in everyday life, we have to turn to principal existential dilemmas rather than to contexts and contingencies. The formation of the four dilemmas spells a quest for a generative grammar of the metalanguage that formulates the various phenomena that constitute the notion of life span. Hence, our perspective summons neither symbolic codes nor relational modes to adduce a vocabulary of apt representations of constancy and transformation. Rather, it applies binary structural oppositions to spawn an abstract model of the dynamics of life transitions; a construct that bears no necessary relevance to any given reality. Instead it endeavors to identify some basic rules of the social engineering of age barriers, gated access to social and cultural capital, building bridges across the ages and last but not least, the emergent

4 terms of undermining and collapsing of this whole edifice.
The four sketchily unfolded dilemmas are as follows: a) Universality versus diversity
Biologically determined and visibly apparent, the ontology of life changes is turned into seemingly universal epistemology that presupposes correspondence between biologicalfunctional transformations and assumed social standing.
The nadir of such congruity is the overall postulation of common essential exigencies deemed vital for human survival and fulfillment in all cultures (Cumming and Henry
1961; Cowgill and Holmes 1971; Turnbull 1983; Hockey and
James 1993). While this approach could be taken as somewhat obsolete due to its in-built predicates as to the reductive driving forces that predetermine the course of life, it nevertheless taps some of the general tenets of human existence. Thus, vying for communal recognition through maturity, establishing social arrangements for procreation such as the family, necessities of economic dependency, the pursuit of meaning and the quest for a dignified final exit could all be regarded as arguable human universals that transcend personal differences, cultural boundaries and social milieus.
However, as anthropology is a diversity sensitive discipline, it either documents various cultural manifestations of responding to such universals (Amoss and Harrell 1981; Holmes and
Holmes 1995) or, alternatively, displays a spectrum of courses of aging in which each culture is of a different exceptional hue. This form of relentless cultural relativism, while encumbering the anthropological imperative for systematic comparison, offers divergent native's points of view that highlight infinitely disparate forking paths of life.
From the claim that social aging is absent from Indian

5 culture (Cohen 1998), through the high emphasis on aging in Samburu gerontocracy (Spencer 1965), to the depiction of culturally contingent life course in Japan as a moving caravan of long term social commitments (Plath 1980), ethnographers of life span transition throw into relief the outstanding cultural outlines that renders a given setting unique.
However, diversity is not merely a matter of cultural differences but also of discrepancy in formations of identity. Thus, while in modern Western settings the ethos of individualism reigns supreme in reckoning the predicted and expected life span, other cultures are based on socially undifferentiated selves that are submerged into an indivisible oneness. This distinction between the two modes of belonging is based on a gulf separating a notion of selfhood as transient embodied personal entity from the idea of selfhood as a constant, communally shared, universal-like body social. Diversity and universality therefore are temporal signifiers rather than spatial parameters. This observation transposes the run-offthe mill anthropological debate of cultural relativism versus human universals from focusing on synchronic comparisons to concentrating on diachronic continuities and discontinuities; that is an epistemological shift from being to becoming, from staging to flow and from discreteness to duration – all evidently draw on different schools of thought and yet suggesting one dialectic of determinacy and indeterminacy. b) Determinacy versus indeterminacy
The thrust of psycho-cultural developmental orientations towards rationalizing the vicissitudes of the course of life has invincibly permeated modernity stricken, progress obsessed sociology, anthropology as well as some branches of psychology. The patterning of life is thus encoded as a meaning seeking journey moving towards a desired life

6 project (Langness and Frank 1981; Gubrium 1993), or through culturally prescribed scripts (Myerhoff and Moore
1978; Cole 1992; Moody 2002). In either case a culturally determined, almost fatalistically carved path of change is inadvertently imagined through implicitly embodied or explicitly scripted texts of identity. Such tracks of meaning seeking are designated to finally arrive at a tellingly aspired departure from life which signifies a culturally contingent conception of the preferable ending. Life stories thus become yardsticks for tracking down retrospectively plotted, meaningfully strung, chains of life events. The search for the 'good death' across the life span (Kaufman and Morgan 1995) coupled with the Aristotelian dictum of a life worthy of living seem to impregnate this presumably ubiquitous human pursuit. No matter what the rudiments of this set course are – evolutionary forces, innate psychological traits, fundamental cultural themes – the paradigm of 'soft' or 'hard' determinacy prevails in most views of the dynamic forces that engender and orchestrate the construction and the rhythm of the life course.
Popular culture uncritically embraces such convictions when giving them abundant coverage and expression in bodily adornment, life styles and fashions, documentary media, cinematic productions, literary fiction and self-help guides. In fact, the late modern dismantling of hegemonic meta-narratives yields a passionate adherence to old poetic formats of tightly contrived drama and verse. However, the post-modern bias towards relational and relative veracity does take its toll on the poetics and politics of everyday living through its emphasis on the autonomy to exercise individual choice and apply personal agency against the grain of presaged scenarios. The seeming irony of that conflated language of contradictory terms of validating reality, draws its inner persuasion from the presumed nexus of immortality and post-modernity as highlighted by Bauman (1992) in his discussion of the eternal masquerading of appearance and disappearance in today's public sphere. Such rebellion against fateful trajectories is evinced in a number of slants to the

7 predictable accountability to one's life career. The autobiographical turn in the social sciences such as in sociological thinking (Fivush and Haden
2003) that extends to the extreme of maintaining the individual's full freedom and charge to conjure her or his curriculum vitae (Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim 2002); in its version of auto anthropology as a cardinal justification for ethnographic account (Okely 1996) or in the ultimate version of reinventing the self in virtual forms and formats. The sole authority of an individual to forge an autobiographical impact of vision and mission out of the materials of own existence, thereby creating a self-sustained, personal yet projective cultural feat, is extensively depicted by advocates of the search and power of self-realization such as in Rapport's Nietzschean analysis of the thrust of individually inspired cultural life projects (2003). Such rebels evince the possibility and potential to overthrow cultural scripts in favor of personal ones that in turn might become constitutive symbolic idioms of heroic stature. This spiraling double helix of the personal and the cultural spells the conditions for transmutations in the relationship between the determinate and the indeterminate, the predictable and the unpredictable.
Contrary to this balanced view a most fervently subversive critique of the superimposed logic of the prefabricated life courses is articulated by
Gubrium, Holstein and Buckholdt (1994) who offer an alternative method to conventional schemes of structuring life as programmed orbits. Their situation anchored constructionism sates that:
"In practice course consists of a configuration of abstract meanings, categories, and labels that are attached to experience through everyday methods of interpretation. In this context, the key to understanding the courses and changes that are said to characterize our lives lies in deciphering how, through words and actions, experience is given developmental shape and meaning." (Ibid p. 26).
This pragmatic outlook on the life course as constantly negotiated order holds in store far reaching consequences. It spells the possibility embodied in late capitalism of consuming life course related images to

8 churn out self-made identities. Representations of desires and desirable insignia associated with certain positions on the made-up life course could be attained regardless of chronological age. In fact, age is turned from an independent variable to a dependent one, thus calibrating changes according to functional capacities and economic, social and symbolic capital. To an extent this reversal of age fortunes is reminiscent of the structure of age related division of labor and its concomitant life transitions such as the formative power of rites of passage in nonliterate societies.
Paradoxically though as it might seem, the undifferentiated age category of old age in modern society licenses its reluctant bearers, namely the elderly to exercise relatively large measure of free will within a rather broad leeway delineated by the very practices of social shunning to which that category is subjected. The occupants of the cultural territory of old age are thus beguiled to adopt any affordable life style they wish to live by (Featherstone and Wernick 1995; Blaikie 1999; Katz 2005). As the balance between determinacy and indeterminacy is hinged on the interplay between the constraints of social structure on the one hand and the individual's capacity to act upon reality on the other (Giddens
1991), conceptions of the life course consist, to various extents, of a blend between the two. Since any edifice of a course of life is about regulating transformations, it is time management devices that design, monitor and control it. It, therefore, is the intercourse between the preset building blocks of social time and the subjectively experienced flow that structures the temporal properties of life and living. c) Social time versus the experience of time
Perhaps the most prominent monitoring controller of the movement through life is concepts of age categorization. Unlike other physiologically moored classificatory principles such as race and sex, age is still a Gordian tie of the natural and the social, hence surpassing both cultural codification and historical periodization. In some simple societies where the lives of all members are converged to follow one track of living from birth to death, 'life term social arena' as coined by

9
Moore (1978), the social gaze is sufficiently powerful to ensure rigid surveillance over observance of age group norms. But, age charted normative maps are not prevalent only in such age separated societies organized around age class systems based on division of labor (Wilson
1951; Stewart 1976; Kertzer and Keith 1984; Bernardi 1985). They also apply to varying degrees to "limited social arena' societies where role differentiation and specialization launch people on different identity tracks. In effect, the bureaucratic nature of modern society assigns a multitude of chronologically set positions, hence amplifying the foundational power of age contrived stratification. Such institutional imperatives delineate and maintain age grounded boundaries turned out to be dominant features of a culture that proverbially and declaratively flouts the importance of age as a source of meaning.
The result of this contradiction in cultural terms is the discontent instilled in the awareness of age discrimination, particularly toward the old. Ageism has been labeled a public problem that entails legal, political, cultural and economic implications generally acknowledged as politically incorrect (Bytheway 1995; Nelson 2002). Like racism, colonialism and sexism, ageism is a form of bigotry, and hence must not be confounded with the phenomenon of segregated age homogenous communities which could even be construed as a means of warding off discrimination (Keith 1980). Contrary to cultures where functional age accounts for accomplished status transitions as performed in the course of rites of passage (Turner 1969), in societies that accord almost mythical significance to the value of numerical indices, chronological age obtains the social classificatory and regulatory qualities of age related competence tests that qualify candidates for an acquired change of identity. Hence, not only has the ascribed power of age not been curtailed in complex societies, but, in the absence of constantly consensual criteria for allocating social resources and rewards, the prominence of the common denominator of age as both a cultural equalizer and divider is on the increase in inverse relation to the eclipse of the shining predominance of hegemonic cultural narratives.

10
This reemphasis of age as a major time structuring device is manifested in contemporary culture in the celebration of temporal benchmarks such as birthdays, anniversaries, festschrifts, memorial days, annual holydays as well as secular personal and public festivals. These are marked out and given due attention irrespective of credit, virtue or achievement, thereby applying ritualistic apparatuses to subdivide the life course into discrete segments imbued with expected respective connotations. Such transformations of meaning induced by age indicators appear to take a firm hold on one's total identity either in situations of being derailed off the set tine track (Roth 1963) such as female singlehood (Lahad 2012), or in the two extreme phases of the life span: childhood and old age. In both instances strong stereotyping interlocked with high dependency except these two ends from the fluctuating continuum of the rest of the life course. However, despite the structural commonality between the two in terms of subscription and submission to the dictates of middle age norms (Hazan and Raz 1997), they are diametrically opposed to each other in regard to their respective assumed temporality. While childhood is invariably assessed, charted and handled with developmental standards and respective social apparatuses, the category of the old is deemed static and stagnant, thereby defying the empowered dynamic domination of so-called middle years (Turner 1987;
Shweder 1998). Even though academics as well as some policy makers have long proposed reclassification of the elderly into sub-categories of young old, old and old-old, third age ad fourth age, octogenarians and centenarians (Neugarten 1979), the cultural imagery of that general human type is of a monolithic character often dubbed euphemistically as senior years or golden age subsumed under 'the third age'. The 'forth age', a scholarly recognized sub-category comprising those whose life world is distinctly different from that of the rest of their old contemporaries, has gained only scant heed in relevant research (Hazan
(2009; 2011). This in spite of the challenges posed by the 'forth age' to the orthodox perspective on the life course as a progressive sequencing of continuous change
As observed by Baltes and Smith (2003:114):

11
"(…) fourth age threatens some of the most precious features of the human mind such as intentionality, personal identity and psychological control over one's future, as well as the chance to live and die with dignity".
The implied supposition imbedded in this reflection is that the state of the 'forth age' is a phase of life essentially divorced from the preceding successive stages of old age .This perplexing, academically unfathomable human condition suggests a transition in conceptions of time, space and meaning as people grow older, particularly in advanced phases of poor health where life expectancy extends the gulf between termination of social belonging and corporeal demise. It suggests a conceptual deadlock deriving from the very notion of course leading to nowhere in modern secularized cultural-demographic contexts of high longevity rate and low elderly integration. The old therefore are denied the status of pilgrims to the temples of modernity that bestow upon their worshipers an aura of social accreditation. In that respect the vacuum of social death assigned to the category of the old becomes a breeding ground for the emergence of indestructible, ultimate otherness.
The social void hatched by this gap between the two ends of life is thus filled with gerontophobic phantasmagorias summoning the deadly horrors of old age (Sankar 1987; Fiedler 1996) reinforced by the still time of retirement (Savishinsky2000) and its designated old age exclusionary enclaves such as nursing homes that render their inmates socially invisible and temporally immutable. As social death precedes biological ending, the disjuncture between them is culturally manufactured as a suspended time zone inhabiting the symbolically expired (Agamben
1998); a twilight zone devoid of time, meaning and place. Instead, an unidentifiable space becomes the final harbor of the very old, and an unplumbed phase of the life course that transfigures into another universe. d) Course versus cycle
The paradox of aging as a continuous experiential process of becoming and the distinct category of old age as being in the world (Baars 2010)

12 calls for cultural resolutions to tackle its discontents. To that aim two divergent paths are followed, each taking a different perspicuous stance.
The first is the insistence on the conviction that elderly people are preoccupied with a pursuit of meaning through dwelling on memories to the extent that some students of aging urge elderly researchees to revisit their past as a reconstructed route for therapeutically attaining self-realization (Myerhoff 1978; Ray 2000). The justification for this line of inquiry lies in the assumption that notwithstanding apparent bodily transformations, the old sustain an unassailable sense of durable self
(Kaufman 1986; Featherstone and Hepworth 1991; Katz 2005).
Conversely, the second outlook turns its gaze to the terms and conditions that circumscribe the disjointed cultural territory of the old and subsequently re-form their lived-in experience. Thus, the moratorium from temporal constraints is sited in a-temporal spaces that resist or ignore change by being exiled from the predictabilities of the course of culture. From institutions for the old (Shield 1988; Savishinsky
1991; Hazan 1992; Gubrium 1997; Stafford 2003) through cinematic representations (Cohern-Shalev 2009; Chivers 2011) to the music and literature created by the old (Said 2006). Contrary to received gerontological wisdom, all of these 'cultures of aging' (Gillleard and
Higgs 2000) seem to indicate the prevalence of closure rather than flux, the presence of the body natural rather than its symbolic embodiment, metonymic patterning of living rather than open-ended metaphoric imagination, spatial construction of reality rather than teleological evolution. This temporal turn from course into cycle, from modern biased linearity into pre/post-modern repetitious fragmentation
(Strathern 1987) offers the old a triple opportunity for taking advantage of the split between the quiddity instilled in their phase of life and the liquidity surrounding it. Hence, and owing to that divergence in inner and outer epistemologies, the tension that produce the four existential dilemmas no longer operates, leaving the life world of the old to conducting an unleashed, uncontrollable experiments in aging, either by way of summing up and life review nor as a tested method for preparing for the expected and yet unknown. Rather three existential options for living with and in that socially discharged last phase (Hazan 1996).

13
First, a newly gained sense of liberation from norms, values, commitments and the futile quest for meaning; second, freedom to be concerned with present life management due to the state of limbo time in which they are marooned (Hazan 1980); third, enlisting still time to arrest impending death by sabotaging its inevitable course. This freshly formatted cyclical time could be pivoted on daily repetition of recurrent habits and customs, on socially affected amnesia annulling past and obliterating future, or on holding on to unarticulated fragments of postmodern life styles. In that sense the juncture of cycle and fragment, both in defiance of context, juxtaposes the pre-modern to the post-modern
(Strathern 1987) making the penultimate pulse of life into an overarching a-historical moment of immortal timelessness immortality just before the last stroke of mortal time.
References

14
Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans.
By Daniel Heller-Roazen), Stanford, Stanford University
Press.
Amoss. P.T. and S. Harrell (eds.) (1981) Other Ways of Growing Old:
Anthropological Perspectives, Stanford, Stanford University
Press.
Baars. J. (2010) “Philosophy of Aging : Time and Finitude” in Thomas
Cold, Ruth Ray and Robert Kastenbaum (eds.) A Guide to
Humanistic Studies in Aging, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
University Press. Pp. 105-120.
Baltes, B.P. and J. Smith (2003) “New Frontiers in the Future of Aging:
From Successful Aging of the Young Old to the Dilemma of the Fourth Age”, Gerontology, 49 :123-135.
Bauman, Z. (1992) Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies,
Cambridge, Polity Press.
Beck . U. and E. Beck-Gernsheim (2002) Individualization : Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences, London, Sage.
Bernardi, B. (1985) Age Class Systems : Social Institutions and Politics
Based on Age, Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-37.
Blaikie. A. (1999) Ageing and Popular Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.

15
Bytheway, B. (1995) Ageism, Buckingham, Open University Press.
Chivers, S. (2011) The Silvering Screen, Toronto, University of Toronto
Press.
Cohen, L. (1998) No Aging in India : Alzheimer’s The Bad Family, and
Other Modern Things, Berkeley, University of California
Press.
Cohen-Shalev, A. (2009) Visions of Ageing : Images of the Elderly in Film,
Brighton, Sussex University Press.
Cole, T.R. (1992) The Journey of Life : Cultural History of Aging in
America, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Cowgill, D. and L. Holmes (eds.)(1971) Aging and Modernization, New
York, Appleton.
Cumming, E. and W.E. Henry (1961) Growing Old : The Process of
Disengagement, New York, Basic Books.
Featherstone, M. and M. Helpworth (1991) “The Mask of Ageing and the
Postmodern Life Course”, in M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth and B. Turner (eds.) The Body : Social Processes and Cultural
Theory, London, Sage, pp. 370-389.

16
Featherstone, M. and A. Wernick (eds.) (1995) Images of Aging : Cultural
Representations of Later Life, London, Routledge.
Fiedler, L. (1996) Tyranny of the Normal : Essays on Bioethnics, Theology and Myth, Lincoln, David R. Godine.
Fivush, R. and C.A. Haden (eds.) (2003) Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self, Mahwah, N.J. Lawrence
Erlbaum Associations.
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the
Tate Modern Age, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Gilleard C. and P. Higgs, (2000) Cultures of Ageing : Self Citizen and the
Body, Essex, Prentice Hall.
Gubrium, J.F. (1993) Speaking of Life-Horizons of Meaning for Nursing
Home Residents, New York, Aldine de Gruyter.
Gubrium, J.F, (1997) Living and Dying at Murray Manor, Charlottesville,
University Press of Virginia.
Gubrium, J.F., J. Holstein and D.R. Buckholdt (1994) Constructing the Life
Course, New-York, General Hall Inc.

17
Hazan, H. (1980) The Limbo People : A Study of the Constitution of the
Time Universe Among the Aged, London, Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Hazan, H. (1992) Managing Change in Old Age : The Control of Meaning in an Institutional Setting, New York, State University of
New York Press.
Hazan, H. (1996) From First Principles: An Experiment in Aging, Westport
(Connecticut), Bergin and Garvey.
Hazan, H. (2009) “Beyond Dialogue : Entering the Fourth Space in Old
Age” in Ricca Edmonson and Hans-Joachin Van Kondratovitz
(eds.) Valuing Older People : A Humanistic Approach to
Aging, Bristol, The Policy Press, pp. 91-104.
Hazan, H. (2011) “From Ageless Self to Selfless Age” in L. Poom and J.
Cohen-Mansfield (eds.) Understanding Well-Being in the
Oldest Old, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 11-
26.
Hazan, H. and A.E. Raz (1997) “The Authorized Self : How Middle Age
Defines Old Age in the Postermodern”, Semiotica, 113, pp.
257-276.

18
Hockey, J. and A. James (1993) Growing Up and Growing Old : Ageing and Dependency in the Life Course, London, Sage.
Holmes, E.R. and L.D. Holmes, (1995) Other Cultures, Elder Years (2 nd .
Edition) Thoussand Oaks, Sage.
Katz, S. (2005) Cultural Aging : Life Course, Life Style and Senior Worlds,
Toronto, University of Toronto Press.
Kaufman, S. (1986) The Ageless Self : Sources of Meaning in Later Life,
Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press.
Kaufman, S. and L.M. Morgan (2005) “The Anthropology of the
Beginnings and the Ends of Life”, Annual Review of
Anthropology, 34, pp. 317-341.
Keith, J. (1980) “The Best is Yet to Be : Toward an Anthropology of Age”,
Annual Review of Anthropology, 9, pp. 339-364.
Kertzer, D. and J. Keith (eds.) (1984) Age and Anthropological Theory,
Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
Lahad, K. (2012) “Waiting, Singlehood and the Sociology of Time”,
Sociological Forum, 27, pp. 163-186.

19
Langness. L.L. and G. Frank (1981) Lives : An Anthropological Approach to Biography, Novarto (Cal.) Chandler and Sharp, Chaps. I,
IV.
Moody, H. (2002) Aging, Concepts and Controversies, London, Sage.
Moore, S..F. (1978) “Old Age in a Life-Term Social Arena : Some Chagga of Kilimanjaro in 1974”, in B. Myherhoff and A. Simic (eds.)
Life’s Career – Aging : Cultural Variations on Growing Old,
Beverly Hills, Calif., Sage Publications Inc., pp. 23-76.
Myerhoff, B. (1978) Number Our Days, New York, Dutton.
Myerhoff, B. and A. Simic (eds.) (1978) Life’s Career – Aging : Cultural
Variations on Growing Old, Beverly Hills, Calif. Sage
Publications Inc.
Nelson, T. D. (ed.) (2002) Ageism : Stereotyping and Prejudice Against
Older People, Cambridge (Mas.) MIT Press.
Neugarten, B. (1979) “Time, Age and the Life Cycle”, American Journal of
Psychiatry, 136(7), pp. 887-894.
Okely, J. (1996) Own or Other Culture, London, Routledge.

20
Plath, D.W. (1980) Long Engagements : Maturity in Modern Japan,
Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press.
Rapport, N. (2003) I am Dynamite : An Alternative Anthropology of
Power, London, Routledge.
Ray, E.R. (2000) Beyond Nostalgia : Aging and Life Story Writing,
Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press.
Roth, J. (1963) Timetables, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merall.
Said, E.W. (2006) On Late Style : Music and Literature Against the Grain,
New York, Pantheon.
Sankar, A. (1987) “The Living Dead : Cultural Aspects of the Oldest Old” in P. Silverman (ed.) The Elderly as Modern Pioneers,
Bloomington, Indiana University Press, pp. 345-356.
Savishinsky, J.S. (1991) The Ends of Time : Life and Work in a Nursing
Home, New York, Bergen and Garvey.
Savishinsky, J.S. (2000) Breaking the Watch : The Meaning of Retirement in America, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

21
Shield, R.R (1988) Uneasy Endings : Daily Life in an American Nursing
Home, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
Spencer, P. (1965) The Samburu : A Study in Gerontocracy in a Nomadic
Tribe, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Stewart, F., (1976) Fundamentals of Age-Group Systems, New York,
Academic Press.
Strathern, M. (1981) “Out of Context : The Persuasive Fictions of
Anthropology”, Current Anthropology, 28, pp. 251-281.
Shweider, R.A. (ed.) (1998) Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural
Fictions), Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
Strathern, M (1987) "Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of
Anthropology", Current Anthropology, 28:251 – 281.
Turnball, C. (1983) The Human Cycle, London, Jonathan Cape.
Turner, B. (1987) “Aging, Dying and Death” in his Medical Power and
Social Knowledge, London, Sage, pp. 111-130.
Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process – Structure and Anti-Structure,
Chicago, Aldine.

22
Wilson, M. (1951) Good Company : A Study of Nyakyusa Age Villages,
Oxford , Oxford University Press.

23