ABSTRACT
One such reconsideration of both social reality and its conceptual fram ing is the recurrent trope juxtaposing old age to childhood. This analogy, which draws on structural similarities of dependency and marginality (Hockey and James, 1993), also suggests another common denominator. That is the tendency to regard both children and the elderly as occupying distinct cultural spaces of identity consisting of exceptional symbolic lan guages, of mythlike properties and self-referent nonlinear dynamics (Hazan, 1996). This sets both childhood and old age as discrete categories separated from other imagined stages of life, hence rendering them unique provinces of knowledge and study. Such perspective requires method ological fortitude as well as an epistemological shift since the prevalent developmental approach to the understanding of life enforces a continuity slant geared to the cumulatively oriented epoch of modernity steering toward predestined upward routes of progress (Bauman, 1991,1992).
