ABSTRACT
Why is community so often a potent topic of interest amongst elderly people? Following Cohen’s lead (1987), I, like many others, have explained the interest in terms of community providing a cultural resource for mediating change, including the changes wrought by bodily ageing (1990). However, this begs a rather obvious question. Bodily ageing is a central, and perhaps the central, experience in the lives of most elderly people. Why, then, have few if any accounts considered seriously the extent to which the experience of bodily ageing itself might be constitutive of elderly people’s senses of community. Focusing on the participants in a range of clubs for the elderly in Ashington, a former coal-mining town in North East England, this chapter considers the relationship between community and bodily ageing, and in particular the experience of mental and physical decline. I offer an account that represents community amongst the elderly simultaneously as a cultural resource and an idea and practice that emerges, in part, from the materiality of bodily experience. More generally, utilizing the work of Thomas Csordas (1994) and, in particular, his use of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ‘being-in-the-world’ (1962), I question the social constructionist simplicities of most anthropological approaches to community and consider the possibility of a phenomenology of community. After a brief description of contexts the paper moves on to explore, in turn, local ideas and practices surrounding bodily ageing, community and the relationship between bodily ageing and community, and then concludes with an analysis and short theoretical discussion.
