Permanent Personhood or Meaningful Decline? toward a Critical Anthropology of Successful Aging

Abstract

The current North American successful aging movement offers a particular normative model of how to age well, one tied to specific notions of individualist personhood especially valued in North America emphasizing independence, productivity, self-maintenance, and the individual self as project. This successful aging paradigm, with its various incarnations as active, healthy and productive aging, has received little scrutiny as to its cultural assumptions. Drawing on fieldwork data with elders from both India and the United States, this article offers an analysis of cultural assumptions underlying the North American successful aging paradigm as represented in prevailing popular and scientific discourse on how to age well. Four key themes in this public successful aging discourse are examined: individual agency and control; maintaining productive activity; the value of independence and importance of avoiding dependence; and permanent personhood, a vision of the ideal person as not really aging at all in late life, but rather maintaining the self of one's earlier years. Although the majority of the (Boston-area, well-educated, financially privileged) US elders making up this study, and some of the most cosmopolitan Indians, embrace and are inspired by the ideals of the successful aging movement, others critique the prevailing successful aging model for insufficiently incorporating attention to and acceptance of the human realities of mortality and decline. Ultimately, the article argues that the vision offered by the dominant successful aging paradigm is not only a particular cultural and biopolitical model but, despite its inspirational elements, in some ways a counterproductive one. Successful aging discourse might do well to come to better terms with conditions of human transience and decline, so that not all situations of dependence, debility and even mortality in late life will be viewed and experienced as "failures" in living well.