Abstract
With the current demographic changes observed in most postindustrial countries around the world, long-standing representations and knowledge about “old age” need to be critically examined. In effect, old age has been either idealized, as the time for wisdom, or feared, as the period of senility. With their focus on development and professional activity, social science and psychology have long considered aging as a decline of physical and psychological capacities, a closing down of the possible. Such view has been largely reflecting negative social representations of the elderly, or “ageism.” A classical attempt to resist these negative representations has been to highlight older people’s activity and capacity to compensate losses and thus maintaining some possibilities open. However, such vision usually overlooks the social and cultural conditions of creating or dismissing the possible in people’s with older age. On the basis of such a critical analysis, an alternative proposition to resist negative representations is made here: old age may be a period in which the possible plays a unique role. Aging is, after all, a life-course developmental process, and as such, the possible plays a central role in people’s lives; it is even more so in old age, where it becomes vital. In addition, old age confers people a unique position from which they can propose alternative possibilities for themselves and the world.
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Zittoun, T. (2022). Old Age. In: Glăveanu, V.P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90913-0_69
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90913-0_69
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