American Folklore and Aging

Traditional expressive culture created around the experience of growing old. During the 1970s, an area of shared interest opened for gerontologists and folklorists, as many in the social sciences abandoned explanatory, scientific paradigms of aging in favor of interpretive approaches. Gerontologists, in search of predictable patterns and processes, theorized aging largely as a social problem: The elderly “disengage” by mutual agreement (disengagement theory), or they actively resist disengagement (activity theory), or they form a discrete subculture in an age-stratified society (subculture theory), or they undergo identity crises, precipitated by the loss of former roles (identity crisis theory) (Mullen 1992:10–13). Folklorists, on the other hand, had long assembled collections—of ballads, riddles, tales, and tunes—from the memories of elders, little heeding a pattern linking the culture collected to an elderly consultant’s position in the life cycle.
As phenomenological perspectives gained ground in the social sciences, folklorists began to attend more carefully to contexts for performance and collection, and gerontologists, shelving the quest for predictable patterns, began to explore how the elderly construct and interpret their own experience. A mutually engaging domain for folklorists and gerontologists has been opened up by questions about how societies constitute the life cycle through culture, how and why intergenerational communication is staged, and what kinds of culture elders create around the experience of growing old.