ABSTRACT
Age seems so ubiquitous that when teaching sociology of old age my students were often incredulous that there were many people in the world who do not know how old they are. When I asked them how they knew how old they were, the answer was easy, as they live in the West where birthdays are a major annual ritual. However, when we dug a little deeper, they would identify how they lived in a highly bureaucratised society in which they were registered at birth and had to certifi cate their age at many points to validate access to age regulated rights: legal rights such as voting, social rights such as marriage and economic rights such as minimum wages. Moreover, their educational careers had been structured around progression up an annual certifi cation ladder within an age specifi c cohort. As many of these students were teenagers they were very aware of the transitions to adult identities with attendant rights and duties – who can drive, who can buy alcohol, who is a legal sexual partner. They were, of course, much less familiar with the bureaucratisation of age in later years which, as a recent retiree, I have a raised consciousness – pension entitlements, bus pass regulations, driving licence renewal at 70, end of jury service duties. In other societies with other cultures and in different times, people neither celebrated birthdays nor bureaucratised age in the way British people currently do. Hence, many could not have put a number to their years since birth. Age is not irrelevant in such societies, but people are differentiated from each other using different criteria, perhaps birth order or reference to key historical or life course events. They coalesce into categories and groups through other methods of marking ‘age’ than chronological time, most frequently through rituals of initiation and other symbolically marked transitions to new statuses such as spouse or elder (Vincent 2005, 2013).
