ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents the pivotal role of culture in analyses of ageing but avoids an essentialist construction of culture. It shows that ageing takes place in both private and public spaces. The chapter discusses elderliness in the context of the South African state, starting with the various ways in which ageing and decline are linguistically and socially constructed among urban, low-educated blacks in South Africa. It explores the social changes, the lurking crisis of morality, and the more overt tensions within urban types of modernity, situating elderliness within a complex field of stressors, reductors and transformers. The chapter focuses on life-story narratives and identity formation in a coloured community. It examines the interstitial dimension of elderhood, locating the hard matter of power between life's daily movements.
