Mining experience : the ageing self, narrative, and social memory in Dodworth, England

• Main Author: Degnen, Cathrine
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: McGill University 2003
• Subjects: Aging > Anthropological aspects > England > Dodworth; Older people > Social networks > England > Dodworth.; Autobiographical memory > Social aspects.
• Online Access: http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19487

In response to the anthropological literature on old age and ageing that remains largely isolated from more contemporary anthropological theory, this thesis re-focuses anthropological attention on the experiences of ageing. Towards this end, I examine the way macro- (history, politics, economics) and micro-level processes (social relations, intergenerational relations, local contexts, individual histories) intersect to frame the cultural construction of old age, personal experiences of "being old", and the self. A central point of intersection between these processes comes from the recent history of social transformation in my fieldsite, Dodworth, a former coal-mining village. Since the late 1980s, this is an area that has been grappling with the rupturing effects of the closure of the coal-mining industry. Attending to these conditions and how they inform the everyday reality and the experiences of ageing and of the self are critical concerns in this thesis. My approach to the ageing self is one that privileges narrativity and temporality as key constitutive elements and which considers the potentially different position of older people in relation to time and to the self. Growing older is a complicated mixture of bodily and social change, and negotiating these shifts has crucial implications for one's sense of self and subjectivity. While "old age" is a category which is readily used in daily discourse and living, what old age is and who is old nevertheless resists anchoring. What old age, being old and ageing meant to my research participants are key questions in order to understand the experience of growing older in Dodworth. Throughout the thesis, I focus on the dialectics of interpersonal interactions in order to speak meaningfully about how the experience of old age is organised and constructed. Emerging in tandem with these issues is another major topic of this thesis: social memory. Talk in Dodworth about places, absences, and relations continually brought the past and present together and was involved in how a sense of self is created. What emerged was a three-dimensionality of memory, an individual and collective way of placing oneself and others in relation to spatial aspects of the villagescape.