From Legacies to Futures: The Lifeworlds of Older Adults in Europe

Older adults want to exercise a sense of control over their relationships, structures and surroundings as they navigate the later life course. Through detailed ethnographic case studies, this book examines the dynamic lifeworlds of a hundred and seven community-dwelling older adults in Europe before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the importance of agency, the frictions between self-perceptions of age and outside impositions and the need to deconstruct old age as a homogenising category. These insights challenge simple narratives of older persons as social burdens by highlighting the complex roles they fill in family, neighbourhood and communities.

A. Jamie Saris is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Maynooth University. He has been working for more than twenty-five years in medical and psychological anthropology in field sites in Ireland, North America, Continental Europe and parts of Africa. He is a founding member and part of the Executive Committee of the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute at Maynooth University.