A Tribal Experience
Our current model of ageing is broken, with loneliness rife among older generations living outside of the family unit. Yet we can look to traditional societies to find more positive, alternative models.
Words Madeleine Morley
Illustration Miguel Porlan
A cigarette hanging from her lip, my great aunt — an ex-hairdresser who wore a beehive in the 1960s — cuts my fringe with shaking yet careful hands. She’s also on the phone, organising the DJ’s arrival time for my aunt’s 40th birthday party that evening, and I can smell the chocolate cake she’s prepared rising in the oven.
The sewing machine is still humming from the Queen of Hearts costume she’s just made for the local primary school play, and later today my cousin will be dropping off her toddler to be babysat for the next week because she’s off on holiday. When my great aunt puts down the phone she explains how I can bleach my hair for five pounds without it going yellow, something no Google search has been able to explain successfully. So as well as everything else she’s giving me a tutorial.
A lot of older adults in big cities or small villages around the world, become very active staples of their community. And yet many, especially in the UK, US and Europe, also end up living far away from their children and friends in retirement homes — they don’t have much to do with their local surroundings so loneliness and boredom are pervasive. Despite the fact that the population of the western world includes more older adults and fewer young people than at any other point in history, the way these cultures perceive their older population is surprisingly unfavourable.
Popular science writer and geographer Jared Diamond says that the way a society treats its elders is entirely to do with the their perceived usefulness; the more useful they are, the greater their worth. But this hasn’t always been the case. Unlike older generations in the US and UK, who often end up living separately from their children, in traditional societies — those that Diamond would refer to as ‘tribal’ — they are fully integrated into the family unit. The way they’re treated differs dramatically from their western counterparts, and Diamond attributes this to their ongoing active roles. Tasks like sourcing and cooking food, babysitting grandchildren, making tools, weapons, baskets and other products, are just a few means by which the elderly play vital roles.
At the other end of the spectrum exists a more ruthless solution to the problem of ageing. For nomadic hunter-gatherers — the Inuit, for example — traversing hostile territories and fluctuating environments leaves no room for infirmity, forcing them sometimes to abandon or euthanise their older adults out of necessity. In the face of swift relocation, carrying the younger generation is hard enough. The Chukchi of Siberia still practise voluntary death, in which older adults request to die at the hands of close relatives when they feel they aren’t able to keep up with the demands of nomadic life.
In larger, modern societies, physical quality of life has improved because of better healthcare and retirement facilities, but Diamond argues that we have forgotten the ways in which older generations play their part. Although we don’t euthanise our seniors like the Chukchi, our constant overlooking of older generations as useful members of society is perhaps more morally bankrupt. Instead of asking grandparents to babysit for example, families often hire others to do so, and the rise of takeaway food culture and ready meals is just one way that the relationship to traditional home cooking has shifted dramatically away from the family. Diamond argues that by looking to traditional models of living intergenerationally, we can find ways to reintegrate older people into modern societies too — a situation that benefits everyone.
In the UK and US there exist competitive commercial habits — the direct result of post-industrial, consumer culture. Professional life is highly valued. Consequently those who don’t work are less respected than those that do, and even those who once worked hard, for decades, see their worth diminished in retirement.
Howling, lonely King Lear springs to mind. Once he’s divided up his kingdom and duties between his two “untender” daughters, he roams aimlessly and without purpose, passed from one daughter’s castle to the other, treated like a used-up, scatter-brained burden who inhibits their gruesome plotting. Robbed of his former status and power, Lear quickly transforms into the “poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man” of the tragedy.
In Shakespeare’s play, respect is wrapped up with power — it’s all about position. Yet in another of his most famous texts, The Tempest, the most powerful character is the venerable Prospero, who — because of his age and experience — has come to know the most. He is the greatest storyteller, and although he is no longer a great King, it is his knowledge that makes him so revered. Wisdom is his value.
The power of great storytelling and knowledge often emerges from experiences garnered by age, and in traditionally tribal societies, knowledge demands more respect than professional standing. In Hawaii, there’s a tradition that grandmothers pick flowers, prick small holes into the centre and bind them together with string to create the well-known lei garlands that form part of their national dress. Esteemed for their knowledge in arts and crafts, they teach their grandchildren skills central to their cultural identity — to sew feathered skirts and make colourful, bright hats. The idea that the elderly have precious knowledge is reflected in the Hawaiian language itself — the word for elders, ‘kupuna’, also means expertise and experience.
“Some communities don’t just feed and fuel themselves on old knowledge, their very survival is based on what their elders pass on.”
Okinawa, an island to the south of Japan, has been identified by demographers as one of the world’s ‘Blue Zones’ due to the unusual longevity of its inhabitants. The average islander is three times more likely to reach the age of 100 than someone living on mainland Japan. Part of this is to do with the island’s unique diet, but it is also because the elderly are more closely integrated into the fabric of everyday life. The daily routine of elderly Okinawans is rigidly structured, and involves a system of informal social support groups known as Moai. As much as a healthy diet, it is a sense of purpose and usefulness amongst the Okinawan elderly that contributes to the island’s remarkable longevity.
If the way that a society treats older generations is bound up in their perceived usefulness, then a wholesale shift in cultural perspective would be key to obliterating the worrying trend of perceiving the old purely as a burden. Looking at how traditional societies prize knowledge over position and explicit economic worth can tell us a lot about how older generations could and should be perceived. After all, the old are the ones who built our modern society and they’ll continue to do so for as long as we let them.
When my great aunt babysits for weekends on end, prepares recipes better than any you can find in a book, when she sews a dress for me from a ‘60s pattern I found in a charity shop that doesn’t have any instructions, these ordinary, everyday activities are of immense value and should always be treated with respect.
To explore the subject of ageing we teamed up with The Powerful Now, an IDEO + SYPartners initiative poised to creatively redefine ageing as a path of continual growth instead of decline. Together we wanted to explore the ways in which health, money, work and communities will exist in our future, and initiate discussions to find radical new solutions.
This article is taken from Weapons of Reason’s third issue: The New Old. Weapons of Reason is a publishing project to understand and articulate the global challenges shaping our world by Human After All design agency.
