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Generational Diversity
Like gender, everyone has an "age" - it is an activity (experience = aging = ripening = enduring) not a thing.
Each society and organization constructs "newbies" and "old salts" in SOME integrative functional manner or another. Often designed with the association's (society or social formation) necessary way of accomplishing its ends
"In today's N. America both children and elderly are ritually and legally excluded from contributing to the formal economy as producers" (Kottak pg 180)
AGE and COHORTS (Boomers, GenX)
Sodalities - eg Maasai age cohorts, or our type - Class of 1997
Aging Society
Aging populations - a perspective that focuses on the differences BETWEEN societies by looking a average age within a society.
Generation Gaps
Intergenerational Conflict - Patricide in 18th Century France, Geronticide in USSR of 1990, SSA upcoming structured conflict between ratios of contributors and consumers. I. E. conflict as class/material contradiction.
Intergenerational Conflict as media driven event - differences are objective, modern media exposes, economy exploits.
Social construction of the child, teen, adolescent, boyo. Compulsory schools. Child labor laws. Management of surplus labor forces, or its redirection.
Social contruction of the elderly, seniors, senile, senescent - the Long-term Care Industry as replacement of family and as responder to increasing #s of old, unnecessary, unabled - made to be useless except as consumers of care.
Bill Thomas (Eden Alternative) suggests that Modern Adulthood (the time of doing) is colonizing and pushing back the borders of both childhood and senescence (the time of being) - the modern dynamics constructed the uselessness of children and elderly, and now creates designs for living in those times by way of fixing them - giving them fixes, usually of, in one case, more "education" (incarceration in schools) and in the other, of more "care" (incarceration in various places called "_____ Home"