ABSTRACT
Old age, the inevitable encounter with the frontier of life and death, is a multidimensional phenomenon. It embraces notions of life history, continuity and change, activity and disengagement, autonomy and dependency, vitality and decline, self-identities and social representations of the aged. It is increasingly recognised in gerontology that the ‘kaleidoscopic’ (Hazan, 1994: 3) character of the realities, experiences, times and places of old age defies conventional and uni-disciplinary attempts to understand it (Katz, 1996). It is now argued that the myriad personal, existential, cultural and political issues involved in ageing, as well as the plural, contradictory and enigmatic meanings of ageing, require the pioneering efforts of those who cross disciplinary boundaries and engage in multiple areas of knowledge production. It is a call for what Fabian has referred to as ‘border crossing . . . between science and literature, ethnography and biography, interpretation and imagination’ (1993: 52).
