Seeking to explore what it means to grow older in contemporary Britain
from the perspective of older people themselves, this richly detailed
ethnographic study engages in debates over selfhood and people's
relationships with time. Based on research conducted in a former coal
mining village in South Yorkshire, England, Cathrine Degnen explores how
the category of 'old age' comes to be assigned and experienced in
everyday life through multiple registers of interaction, including that
of social memory, in a postindustrial context of great social
transformation. Degnen argues that the complex interplay of social,
cultural and physical attributes of ageing means that older people can
come to have a different position in relation to time and to the self
than younger people, unseating normative conventions about narrative and
temporality.