ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of basic aspects of Age Studies, before returning to a discussion of The Godfather. It concerns an understanding of old age not as a medical problem or from the perspective of social demographic change, but as a question of the social and cultural construction of the meaning and dignity of individual lives. Age Studies as a discipline within Cultural Studies is concerned with the social and cultural construction of age as a category of difference in modern Western society. In pre-industrial societies, fewer people than today reached the stage of old age, particularly when they lived under risky conditions like, for instance, seventeenth-century Chesapeake colonists whose average life expectancy was twenty-five. Texts that contain the perspective of old age, thus, may offer additional insights: into how culture ages individuals, how age functions as a symbolic category that is deeply naturalized, and at the same time, how age interlocks with other categories of difference.
