Introduction. Ageing time beings: Temporality and ethics in old ages Introduction. Des êtres temporels vieillissants : temporalité et éthique du grand âge

Abstract

What can we learn about temporality by studying different ways of measuring time, institutional time regimes, and (a)typical experiences and creations of time when growing older? This introduction sets perspectives on this question from the anthropologies of ageing, ethics, and temporality. Understanding humans as time beings, we argue that attention to connections between large-scale history, collective temporal registers, and small-scale singularities of the experience of time can reveal and destabilize common representations of ageing and time. We propose an analytical direction that acknowledges and attends to situations of uncertainty and suffering, while also foregrounding questions about ‘the good’, not only through paying attention to cultural values such as ‘active ageing’, ‘filial piety’, or ‘desired dependency’ (and critiques of them), but also smaller scale, oppositional, and atypical values and poetics of ageing and time. We introduce the contributions in the special issue with close-up ethnographies from Canada, Denmark, India, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, and the United States, and the core argument across the contributions regarding how time manifests in multiple ways but is ontologically groundless. This lays the ground for critiquing various dogmas about age and time and opens up possibilities of affording plural temporalities in social life.