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This chapter opens our critical review of the theories which have been developed to explain how individuals make their entries into and exits from society and how, in the process, they come to take on particular identities. We begin with a discussion of the rituals and rites through which human ageing is produced and made meaningful in different societies. To this end, the chapter asks how identification — the negotiation of social identity — relates to the human body and the radical changes which it undergoes between its conception and disposal. Writing as a westerner, J. B. Priestley reveals his experience of a rupture between the personal identity which he has sustained from early adulthood, the ageing of his body, and the social identity which others read off from that body. He describes this experience as follows: It is as though, walking down Shaftesbury Avenue as a fairly young man, I was suddenly kidnapped, rushed into a theatre and made to don the grey hair, the wrinkles and the other attributes of age, then wheeled on stage. Behind the appearance of age I am the same person, with the same thoughts, as when I was younger (Puner, cited in Featherstone and Hepworth, 1989: 148). How, then, have social theorists accounted for this disjuncture between personal and social experience which seems to be part of an ageing identity? Have their accounts addressed the question of whether the ageing process — from birth to death — is similarly experienced, understood and managed at different points in the life course in different societies? In this second chapter we consider the traditional explanations offered by social science. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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