Aging People as Communal Actors

This article discusses the variety of social activities of aging people in a community. The first aim of this study is to explore how to overcome two dichotomies—public–private as spheres of everyday life and third–fourth age—and by overcoming these, to make visible the personal social resources of older people, which are not usually recognized in policy discourses or in social policy research. Second, we ask whether the problem-oriented rhetoric of aging in Finnish social and rural policy can be challenged from the perspective of aging people’s activities. The article analyzes older people as actors of a rural village community and overcomes the two dichotomies mentioned above from the theoretical context of agency. In this research, rural East Finland is a case with which to investigate social relationships between people. We suggest that seniors not only participate in a variety of communal activities but also act in their homes, which are culturally coded as the territory of private life. By “just being there,†people also produce and reproduce rural communities in many ways. This is a form of action that has been largely ignored by policies, policymakers, and social studies.