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Ageing and Imagined Community: Some Cultural Constructions and Reconstructions

This paper develops Anderson's (1983) concept of ‘imagined community’ to explore the social meaning of popular images of ageing and the beliefs of older people. Popular iconography and texts are examined in relation to the representation of ‘normal’ or ‘positive’ ageing in areas including the marketing of seaside towns as places for retirement through the emphasis upon heritage, British holiday brochures for old people, lifestyle magazines, and the general sites of death, dying, funerals and bereavement ‘therapy’. These are seen as prescriptive representations that are sanitised and fictional. Emphasising communalism and homogeneity, they ignore the realities of history, and the differences and inequalities to be found amongst the old as a social group. This ‘vocabulary of motive’ (Mills 1940) of imagined community is found to be predominant within positive images of ageing, especially those found in ‘consumer culture’. The paper also considers how ageing can become a theatre for the interpretation and performance of imagined community in autobiographical context.