Abstract
This article belongs to the special cluster, “Politics and Current Demographic Challenges in Central and Eastern Europe,” guest-edited by Tsveta Petrova and Tomasz Inglot.
Like other countries in Europe, Poland’s population is growing older, because of a combination of increasing life expectancies and decreasing birth rates. Such demographic change poses challenges for policy makers, who often understand population aging to put strain on social-service, health care, and pension systems. In response, governments and civil society often emphasize “active aging,” a rubric encompassing a wide range of policies and programs meant to promote health, workforce participation, lifelong learning, and social engagement. Although active aging is often part of neoliberal policies that focus on individual responsibility, recent anthropological theory shows that neoliberal ideals of self-care cannot fully explain contemporary forms of responsibility and social relations. Anthropological theory and ethnographic data can thus help to analyze the effects of demographic change as evident in social policy and programs. In this article, I integrate an analysis of Polish governmental documents meant to promote active aging with an analysis of ethnographic data of older Poles’ experiences of active aging. This article provides an ethnographically grounded perspective on the concept of active aging that focuses on how people actually experience such policies by exploring the meanings such programs and activities take on in the lives of individual and groups. Ethnographic data reveal that the past has multiple emotional valences that shape people’s experiences of these programs, stemming from histories of violence and rupture in the region. This suggests that making explicit the multiple, complex meanings of the past could shape active aging policy and thus civil society to be more inclusive.
Introduction: Creating Civil Society through Active Aging
Like other countries in Europe, Poland’s population is growing older, because of a combination of increasing life expectancies and decreasing birth rates. Such demographic change poses challenges for policy makers who often understand population aging to put strain on social-service, health care, and pension systems. In response, governments and civil society organizations often emphasize “active aging,” a rubric encompassing a wide range of policies and programs meant to promote health, workforce participation, lifelong learning, and social engagement. As defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), “active ageing is the process of optimizing opportunities for health, participation, and security in order to enhance quality of life as people age.” 1 This was developed as part of the Second UN World Assembly on Ageing in 2002 in Madrid, as part of addressing global population aging. 2 The concept is related to other concepts like “successful,” “healthy,” “productive” aging 3 that together respond to theoretical and cultural concepts of aging as a process of decline 4 or as a fundamentally negative process. 5 Active aging efforts can be quite popular among many older people in diverse contexts around the world where they are implemented. Active aging can include programs like exercise classes, lecture series, foreign language classes, hobby groups, volunteering, and opportunities for socialization. 6
Initiatives promoting active aging often emerge in concert with other programs promoting neoliberal forms of politics and policies. Such neoliberal policies have become increasingly dominant since the retracting of welfare states in the 1970s. In Poland and the Czech Republic, for example, active aging policies have been part of discussions of pension reforms and increased labor-market participation. 7 Critical readings of such policies reveal an implicit philosophy of the relationship between society and citizens, and even of the very nature of what it is to be a person. Social theorists, anthropologists, and critical gerontologists have noted the presumed neoliberal subject at the heart of such polices, pointing out that these policies are based on the ethos that individuals—rather than the state or other institutions—should take responsibility for their own well-being. 8 These neoliberal policies discursively construct older persons as autonomous actors, who, through free choice, enact their responsibility to the state and society. Foucauldian analysis has helped to explain this relationship between self and society, and the attendant proliferation of programming promoting self-care across the life course, including in old age.
These individualizing philosophies are sometimes explicit in writings promoting successful and active aging. For instance, the gerontologists John W. Rowe and Robert L. Kahn, in their canonical text on successful aging, write: “Successful aging is dependent on individual choices and behaviors. It can be attained through individual choice and effort.” 9 Such philosophies are also sometimes taken up on the ground, as when some active-aging advocates I knew in Poland described with frustration their observations that older Poles would wait for doctors to advise them on their health, rather than engaging in preventive health-promoting behaviors themselves. 10
However, recent anthropological theory has argued that neoliberal ideals of self-care cannot fully explain the forms of responsibility that exist in the contemporary world. Rather, people are enmeshed in multiple forms of interdependent social relations (e.g., relations of kinship, friendship, and care), have obligations to institutions (e.g., schools, workplaces), and engage in commitments to larger-scale entities (e.g., the state, the environment, identity groups). 11 This focus on the interdependent nature of social relations aligns with classic anthropological understandings of the person as socially constructed, emergent, and interdependent. 12 Thus, when applied to analyzing social policies related to active aging, these theoretical perspectives raise questions about the kinds of interdependencies, obligations, and responsibilities in which older persons may be engaged. Given that these social relations are built on histories of relations, it follows that relational history should also be taken into account when developing active aging policies. In this article, I use such anthropological theories to analyze social policies and programs that have developed in the context of demographic change in Poland.
In addition to ideas of the relationship between the person and society, active aging initiatives are also built on dominant contemporary understandings of aging and the life course in which retirement from industrial or postindustrial labor heralds a new phase of life, sometimes called the “third age.” Scholars and policy makers imagine the third age as a time in the life course when one has left the formal labor market, remains healthy, and can thus contribute to society through activities such as volunteering. 13 This phase of life is historically particular to the demographic and political-economic shifts of the second half of the twentieth century (in North America and Europe). The ideal form of the third age is opposed to the “fourth age,” a time supposedly characterized by decline and dependence. 14 Thus the concept of active aging is built on a set of binary oppositions: activity/passivity, health/illness, and success/failure. These oppositions flatten the multiplicity of experiences and ideologies of personhood to only two categories, which can work to further forms of exclusion in old age.
Indeed, the ideal form of the third age is only available for some segments of the population, namely, those who are financially secure enough to cease employment, healthy enough to avoid extensive medical care, and without other forms of kin or social obligations. In other words, this ideal excludes those of lower socioeconomic status, those with illness or debility, and with time-consuming responsibilities to kin or others. Yet despite these exclusions, the ethnographic record shows that many older people live meaningful, valued lives despite financial and health challenges. For instance, older people who live in institutional care or receive home care due to debility would seem to be excluded from ideals of independence that characterize active aging, yet they are able to form meaningful social relations through practices of care that allow them to live valued lives. 15 Dementia would seem to be the opposite of active aging, yet friends of persons with dementia describe with delight the discovery of a new aspect of an old friend’s personality, for instance, that has emerged in the course of the illness, thus giving new meaning to that valued friendship. 16 In sum, multiple forms of social relations continue to shape experiences of late life, and the ideal form of the third age is only one way to live a meaningful life. 17 In this article, I use ethnographic data to show how understanding lived experiences of late life could help programs related to the third age to be more inclusive by reaching a wider swath of the population.
When programs build on normative ideals of the third age that omit such complexity and specificity, one-size-fits-all kinds of policy can emerge, as has so often been the case for a range of development projects. Indeed, in eastern Europe after 1989, active aging programs have been part of larger historical narratives about the transition from socialism to postsocialism. 18 More specifically, active aging has been part of a broader discourse on promoting civil society in eastern Europe. Some institutions and programs promoting active aging have actually been funded by organizations that emerged out of American efforts to build civil society in the region. 19 The topic of civil society itself has been central to development projects and to characterizing the relationship between state and society in eastern Europe after the end of state socialism. 20 Although some claimed that civil society did not exist during state socialism because of the pervasive nature of the state, 21 others have argued that civil society did exist during state socialism, although the form varied. 22
In contemporary Poland, civil society remains a desirable form of social life, and thus continues to matter as a category of practice, regardless of its status as a category of analysis, meaning that it deserves ethnographic attention. 23 For purposes of this article, civil society refers to non-kin social relations that often, but not necessarily, occur through organizations that are neither state- or church-based. 24 Among older people in Poland, the label of civil society could be applied to neighborhood senior clubs, groups for retirees from a certain company or professional society, those who gather because of shared affinities for certain activities (e.g., allotment gardening, bicycling), and Universities of the Third Age (UTAs), lifelong learning institutions that are focused specifically on active aging.
Contemporary active-aging programming in Poland has thus been shaped by demographic and political-economic change. However, in order to better understand how these programs produce forms of inclusion and exclusion, it is necessary to take a more micro-level perspective. This scalar shift from macro- to micro-level engages with a long history of interdisciplinary conversation between demography and anthropology, which have shared interests in human populations and in the vital forces by which populations are transformed. 25 However, with both epistemological and methodological differences, the conversation has often been difficult to sustain.
Rather than engaging head-on with the question of integrating demography and anthropology, in this article I use anthropological theory and ethnographic data to analyze the effects of demographic change as evident in social policy and programs. This approach begins from the empirical situation in Poland, in which the demographic transition currently underway is such that it poses fundamental questions about the relationship between the state and its population, and the normative ideals regarding the responsibilities that citizens and institutions have to one another. 26 Social policies reflect and formalize specific, and usually hegemonic, understandings of what kinds of persons and relations are valued and supported by the state. In this article, I integrate an analysis of Polish governmental documents meant to promote active aging with an analysis of ethnographic data of older Poles’ experiences of active aging, to argue that making explicit the potential emotional power of the past can improve active aging policy by making it more inclusive.
The data to build this argument consist of two types. The first is a set of texts that are part of a Polish governmental initiative running from 2014 to 2020 called Government Program for the Benefit of Social Activity/Active-ness of Older People (Rządowy Program na rzecz Aktywności Społecznej Osób Starszych; hereafter referred to as ASOS Program). This was preceded by another initiative under the same name that ran from 2012 to 2013. Both programs provided competitively awarded funds for a variety of programs promoting active aging. These policies identify—and aim to ameliorate—low levels of social participation among older people in Poland, which they partially attribute to a “general disinclination towards social activity” related to the past. Ethnographic data from active-aging contexts helps to make this “general disinclination” more specific by explaining the multiple valences of the past. These data stem from twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork on aging in Poland. In particular, I draw on data from ethnographic fieldwork at the Uniwersytet Trzeciego Wieku (University of the Third Age, hereafter UTA) in Wrocław, one of my primary fieldsites. 27
This article thus provides an ethnographically grounded perspective on the concept of active aging that focuses on how people actually experience such policies by exploring what meanings such programs and activities take on in the lives of individual and groups. As I demonstrate in the following sections, the neoliberal individual presumed to be the subject of active aging programs does not actually appear as such in either Polish policies regarding active aging or in older Poles’ experiences of these programs. Rather, the policies attempt to account for the complex interdependencies of bodies, persons, relations, and structures that together constitute the demographic group, that is, older Poles. They also attempt to account for the effects of the socialist past on the present lives of older Poles, yet fall short of doing so in ways that ethnographic data can help to illuminate. The ethnographic data reveal that the past has multiple emotional valences that shape people’s experiences of these programs, stemming from the varying traumatic histories of the wartime years and those that followed. This suggests that the multiple, complex meanings of the past could inform social policy to be more inclusive of people with differing life histories.
Addressing the Issue of Social Participation through Active Aging Policy in Poland
Although scholars have critiqued the concept of active aging for being a handmaiden of neoliberal forms of personhood, close examination of recent Polish governmental policy documents (ASOS Programs 2012–2013 and 2014–2020) promoting active aging reveal this characterization to be limited. That is, policy makers have a more nuanced idea regarding what constitutes active aging and how it should be promoted than do some critics of the concept. In both documents, they draw on the work of demographer Piotr Szukalski, writing that “the concept of active aging consists of ensuring the individual has the possibility of being socially productive for as long as possible. Social productivity is defined as every activity which produces welfare and service, regardless of whether paid or unpaid, including such activity as domestic work, care for children, volunteering, and aiding family and friends.” 28 This explicitly social view of productivity encompasses multiple forms of sociality, notably including domestic and family relations. This inclusion of domestic and kinship spheres aligns with a more expansive and processual view of civil society, 29 and thus stands in contrast to more formalist understandings of civil society in which it is constituted as a category distinct from either state or family. This is intriguing, as these documents also note that active aging is a goal of policies focused explicitly on building civil society. 30 It also contrasts to the standard demographic categorization of the population into “pre-productive,” “productive,” and “post-productive” that occurs earlier in these same documents 31 by including a more expansive concept of productivity than simply participation in the labor market.
Notably, both ASOS Programs also avoid presuming a normative older subject, and rather engage with the specificities of experiences of older Polish people. First, the authors compare Poland to its fellow European Union members, finding that it fares poorly in a European-wide measure, the Active Ageing Index (AAI), conducted in 2012. Specifically, Poland rated the lowest (twenty-seventh out of twenty-seven) in both the overall ranking and the ranking for social participation, and near the bottom of rankings in the other categories (employment, independent living, and possibilities for active aging). 32 These low rankings seem to echo longstanding laments about the lack of civil society in Poland and other postsocialist countries, but also raise the issue of the need to be skeptical about the construction and execution of these measures.
Moreover, these policy documents provide survey-based explanations for these low numbers of participation. These reasons are
● worsening of health condition in accordance with the passage of time;
● material situation with lessening expectations and needs for quality of life;
● feeling of loneliness and marginalization;
● general disinclination for social activity related to events from earlier phases of life and life experiences;
● great involvement in family life, including care of grandchildren;
● poorly developed volunteer competency in Poland, in other words, a situation in which a person leaving the labor market has the possibility of sharing her or his knowledge and experience with a younger worker in their field; and
● insufficient digital competency. 33
Many of these items (health, finances, family obligations) are rather straightforward as explanations of why older adults cannot participate in active aging. Other items seem to align with explanations about the role of the socialist past in shaping the experiences of older generations in Poland, such as the “general disinclination for social activity, related to events from earlier phases of life and life experiences.” Yet the documents provide no insight into the nature of these events or how they might shape older adults’ willingness to participate in social activities.
Moreover, the phrase “general disinclination” reveals an implicit model of the person in which a person makes choices based on past experiences. However, this language raises multiple questions regarding how and why people engage in social relations, such as how past experiences shape contemporary choices, the relationship of these “events from earlier phases of life and life experiences” to contemporary social engagement, the formation of this “general disinclination,” and the relationship of participation in this “social activity” to “family life.” Analyzing ethnographic data from the UTA can help answer these questions by revealing the implicit qualities and meanings of the social relations that occur in an active aging context. This can address how social policy motivated by demographic changes can be made more inclusive. I now turn to an overview of the UTA, and then to the first example, in which I describe an exemplary memory-training class at the UTA that illustrates how various elements of earlier life phases and experiences come to matter—quite explicitly—in the activities of the group.
The Sociality of Universities of the Third Age: The Role of the Past
Universities of the Third Age are lifelong learning institutions specifically for retirees and older adults. Founded in France in 1973, UTAs can now be found in many parts of the world. 34 All UTAs share a commitment to education in late life as a means to make old age a positive time in the life course and tend to be experienced as overwhelmingly positive for people who participate in them. 35 Yet UTAs are also based on the (often unspoken) premise that old age is a time in the life course that needs intervention to become valued, both for older persons themselves and the society of which they are a part. UTAs have experienced a boom in Poland in the last ten years, from fewer than two hundred to more than four hundred across the country. Some UTA leaders in contemporary Poland encourage older people to engage in activities, such as learning English and computer skills, that are supposed to be transformative and create a new mentality, in which growing old is a positive experience, rather than in socialist-era understandings of the person and the life course in which youth is valorized over old age. In addition to these types of classes, UTAs also offer activities like choir, handicrafts, and sailing. The recent proliferation of UTAs and the pro-EU sentiments of many participants and leaders make these institutions seem decidedly postsocialist and westward-oriented. In fact, they are part of civil society-building projects, and have received funding from the Polish-American Freedom Foundation, an organization founded with funds from USAID investment in Poland after 1989. 36
Like UTAs in many parts of the world, participants at UTAs in Poland tend to be relatively well-educated, well-off older adults, having retired from careers such as education, health care, engineering, and administration. They are also relatively healthy, with a notable lack of mobility issues. In the almost two years I spent doing fieldwork there, I saw several people with canes but no one who used a wheelchair. Nationally, more than 80 percent of participants are women, evidence that this is a form of social engagement that appeals to women more than men. Although UTAs vary in organizational structure and form, the UTAs in Wrocław and Poznań offered numerous classes throughout the academic year, such that some participants structured their daily lives around these activities. Although many of these activities could be interpreted as promoting individual responsibility in line with ideals of active aging, ethnographic data show that these institutions also foster other forms of social engagement, in which the past comes to play a key role.
Clamoring to Remember
Among the classes offered at the UTA is a “memory training” course. 37 The cognitive exercises that constitute the class are meant to help participants maintain the cognitive memory skills they already had, as well as to learn new skills and habits of remembering. Such classes are frequent in active-aging contexts, both in Poland and elsewhere, and can be seen as examples of self-care. However, close attention to interactions among słuchacze (participants, literally “auditors”) 38 reveals the memory-training classroom to be a site for creating new forms of sociality, in which the suffering of the past can form the basis for connection in the present. 39
The six słuchacze met together with the instructor, a young woman who was a master’s student in andragogika (andragogy, or adult education), once weekly, as one of several classes during the academic year at the UTA. 40 They seemed to enjoy the class, often talking over one another and engaging in joking, banter, and friendly competition. Many exercises were rather straightforward, in which the participants were asked to recall words (e.g., listing ten words beginning with the prefix “anti-” [“anty-”] or “before”/ “in front of” [“przed-”]). However, the teacher, pointed out that these exercises could also have a personal component to them. Of the words “preschool” (“przedszkole”) and “entranceway” (“przedpokój”), she suggested that people perhaps recalled their own preschools or entranceways as they did this exercise, thereby encouraging them to make these activities personal.
However, some exercises became more detailed, such as the visualization activities. On one day in May 2009, the teacher asked the słuchacze to remember their elementary schools.
We’re closing our eyes, we’re imagining that in this moment, we are transported to our elementary school (laughter from woman in class). And now your task, for the next minute, is to enter the corridor of your elementary school. Yes. Notice specifically what there is in the corridor (more laughter). Maybe you see some friends, a teacher. What did they look like? What was the women’s makeup like, what was their hair like . . . you notice the weather—is it as beautiful as today? And after a minute of this imagining a virtual stroll around our old elementary schools, you all will take a pen in your hands and write everything that you saw. Ok? We’re closing our eyes . . . and we’re opening the door of our elementary school. We’re going inside and starting to look around. 41
The teacher spoke these words in a sing-songy tone of voice, reminiscent of how one might speak to a child. She then reminded people to keep their eyes closed, and the exercise turned into a different sort of interaction.
We’re closing our eyes.
This is torturous.
Maybe something outside the school, you go outside to PE, that’s ok too. Everyone, I see there are problems with focusing.
I don’t have the strength to focus! For this, I dream.
Me too. I have a horrific image.
I have a horrific image as well.
Just another moment.
I don’t want to think about this topic. 42
As the above interaction was occurring, the teacher instructed Słuchaczka 1, who had commented on the “torturous” nature of the exercise, to close her eyes. Słuchaczka 1 remarked that she preferred not to think about elementary school, when Słuchaczka 2 chimed in to say that she could tell her story: “Well, I can tell about my horrors that I lived through, exactly in elementary school.” 43 Although Słuchaczka 1 commented that she too could tell about the horrors that she experienced, Słuchaczka 2 continued with her story. She spoke in a manner that suggested she had told this story many times before, stating that she had been deported to Siberia, and after she returned, was the oldest student in the classroom, at twelve years old. Despite saying that she could not focus, Słuchaczka 1 then rejoined the conversation by saying “I have a terrible przeżycie.” 44 As an elementary-school student, she and all her classmates witnessed the Gestapo enter the school, search for—and find—the twenty-two partisans who were hiding there, and then beat and kill them. At this point, another słuchaczka joined the conversation, inquiring where this Gestapo attack occurred, to which Słuchaczka 1 responded that it was in a village near Kielce, in an area where there were many partisans in the forests.
As the słuchacze were discussing these past events, the teacher interrupted: “Everyone, it’s very good that these women spoke about this, right? Because, um, such an experience is your life’s baggage.” 45 The two słuchacze agreed; the one who spoke of the Gestapo said, “This is my trauma. I awake in the night from fear,” thinking “it’s good that this was only a dream.” 46 The teacher then complimented the women on the quality of their memories by saying, “please look, uh, how vivid is your memory, right?” At this point, a man who had previously not spoken interrupted to say, “very vivid!” The teacher continued, “Such a simple exercise, which theoretically, hm, which shouldn’t build such great emotion, builds an exceeding amount of emotion. That’s why I want to calm you all down. I propose a relaxing . . . .” The man interrupted again, saying “it won’t work.” 47 At this point, the conversation shifted in dynamic as several słuchacze shared positive memories about elementary school. Even the woman who had told of her time after returning from Siberia spoke, reading two poems that she wrote to mark the end of the academic year at the UTA, one about seniors and the other about youth.
From that point on, the class took on a different emotional tenor. The teacher led the class in more word games and exercises like those described above. She ended the class with a final visualization exercise, instructing them to imagine they were holding, looking at, seeing, smelling, and tasting an apple. Everyone agreed that the apple tasted delicious. The teacher pointed out that this exercise could serve as a lesson for the słuchacze—that they can control their thoughts, rather than vice versa. The teacher ended class by saying that “how much depends on our will . . . a smile depends only on us.” 48
During this class, multiple forms of sociality were co-occurring: the enactment of a memory training exercise, simultaneously hesitant and forceful recollections of childhood suffering, and discussions of shared histories. The stories that the słuchacze told were of personal experiences of suffering, yet hinged on events that were quickly understood by their fellow classmates. That is, they shared stories for which they knew they would find support from their classmates, as both these stories presented the general contours of well-known horrors. Perhaps there were others in the room who had experienced either Siberian exile or attacks by the Gestapo—or another wartime atrocity that was so common during the first half of the twentieth century in Poland. Certainly, the other słuchacze had heard similar stories before. Of course, this is not meant to equate the experience of exile in Siberia with attacks by the Gestapo, but rather to highlight the similar function that these stories played in the UTA classroom. Although these stories were individual, they also contained a shared generational element. In this active aging classroom, słuchacze were reshaping their own personhood through engaging with their collective history to create a vital sociality in the present.
This case of lively remembering seems a model of active aging as envisioned by the ASOS policy discussed earlier, without any of the “general disinclination” toward social engagement. It also demonstrates the vitality of the past in shaping interactions in the present. This example provides a useful contrast to the next case, that of an older man I call pan Florian (a pseudonym), who was considered by UTA teachers and other słuchacze to be an exemplary słuchacz. Despite this, I present his case here as an exemplar of someone who had what could be glossed as a “general disinclination” to participate in the UTA. Closer examination reveals that this so-called “general” attitude draws from very particular life experiences that, like those of the słuchacze in the memory classroom, were also shared.
Histories of Exclusion
Pan Florian was a retired doctor who I met through the UTA in Wrocław. Together with his wife, pani Ania, 49 who had worked at the Agricultural University in Wrocław and later in environmental protection, they attended the conversational English class that I led and invited me over for obiad (the traditional midday meal) several times. I soon learned that these meals were actually daylong events, as pan Florian would regale me with stories of his life.
Born in 1927 near Wilno (Vilnius), pan Florian’s stories often centered on his six and a half years in Siberia as a teenager. 50 Together with his mother and sister, at 5 a.m. on 13 April 1940, he was forced out of his home and sent on a train to Siberia. His father, who worked as a civil servant, was murdered in Katyń, although pan Florian never had proof of this. In Siberia, they survived in part thanks to the talents of pan Florian’s mother, who was an excellent knitter, so they had goods to barter for food. Pan Florian described the difficulties of life there, of manual labor, food shortages, and illness. Upon going through his uncle’s belongings after his death in 1962, pan Florian learned that his grandfather or great-grandfather (he could not remember which) was also deported to Siberia for participating in the uprising of January 1863 against the Russian tsar.
This time in Siberia shaped his social relations after the war. According to pan Florian, Sybiracy, or people who had been deported to Siberia, understood what Stalin’s rule truly meant. 51 This gave him a different perspective than some of his peers. As a student in postwar Poland, pan Florian refused to join the Związek Młodzieży Polskiej (Union of Polish Youth) in order to receive a stipend, saying to an acquaintance, “I’m not selling myself for money.” 52 Indeed, he remembers his student years as very difficult because he felt scared and was “ostrożny” (“wary,” “cautious”) in relationships with his fellow students. He had no true friends, he said, because of this. Pani Ania and others, he said, could have fond memories of their youth because they did not live with the fear of living under Soviet rule that he and other Sybiracy did. Residents of Poznań and Silesians “had no idea, for example, what Siberia was.” 53 He said that people who did not know Soviet rule first-hand thought that if one was deported to Siberia, one must have been a thief or committed a crime. “They didn’t know that it was because you were a Pole. They didn’t know that.” 54 For pan Florian, his exile in Siberia had a profound effect on his intimate relations and his understandings of his peers, such that he either refused to join or maintained a skepticism about group activities.
Indeed, his skepticism about belonging to groups characterized his participation at the UTA. He only joined because his wife insisted that he do so, and indicated that he did not much care for the activities of the group. Despite his own hesitation and lack of interest in the UTA, pan Florian was quite well-known among the master’s and doctoral students who led classes and workshops at the UTA. Pan Florian and pani Ania participated in the workshop, Spotkanie w czasoprzestrzeni—grupa dialog między generacjami (Meeting in space-time: the group for dialogue between generations), which consisted of both master’s and doctoral students in pedagogy as well as słuchacze from the University of the Third Age. Students led creative exercises that often involved remembering and story-telling. One such activity was to describe one Wigilia that one had experienced. Wigilia, or Christmas Eve, is the most important holiday of the year for most Poles, and is generally celebrated with a large family meal in the evening. The słuchacze and students alike were to compose a story about one Wigilia in their life, which they then shared with the group. A year after this activity, pani Ania fetched from their bedroom a folder overflowing with papers and pulled out pan Florian’s Wigilia story to show me. Pan Florian read his story out loud, which describes trying to preserve Polish traditions during Wigilia in Siberia, despite a lack of customary food and other items. The story was considered a masterpiece by the students, who featured it on a poster prominently displayed at the UTA.
Notable here is the degree to which pan Florian exhibited what could be categorized as a “general disinclination” to join and participate in the UTA—and yet he was considered the star pupil. There are two surprises here that could inform other aspects of social policy: first, that he would participate at all, and second, that he would become an exemplar when he did participate. As for the first part, the ethnographic data reveal that his “general disinclination” in fact was quite specific. His experience in Siberia shaped his postwar experiences, leading to a lack of trust in forming social relations. If pani Ania were not present, it is highly unlikely that pan Florian would participate in the UTA, given his past wariness of joining groups and of making new friends. But yet he did participate—and excelled. This can be explained by the biographical format and intergenerational component of the storytelling class, which provided an opportunity to share his stories and have them heard by valued listeners. Taken together, the strength of pani Ania’s influence on pan Florian and the students’ admiration of him intersected with pan Florian’s memories of past exclusion and inclusion to create moments in which he became an exemplar of a culturally valued form of active aging. Although pan Florian was disinclined to participate in active-aging programs, he did so because of the strength of the kin tie with his wife. Once he was participating in the program, he did so in a way that modeled a culturally valued ideal of an older person: that of the wise elder who shares life histories demonstrating that, even in times of suffering, he upheld Polish traditions. This complexity could only emerge through detailed storytelling and getting to know pan Florian himself, thus speaking to the importance of integrating micro-level ethnographic data and analysis with the macro-level of demographic and policy data and analysis.
Conclusion: How Might Multiple Meanings of the Past Shape Possibilities for Civil Society?
Taken together, these ethnographic examples provide context that could help to explain the low levels of participation in social activities as identified in the ASOS policy documents. The “general disinclination” becomes less general when viewed from the experiences of these słuchacze. In other words, the role of traumatic memories and of previous experiences of inclusion and exclusion emerge as significant in shaping the possibilities for inclusion in the present. Indeed, given their emotional force, it seems likely that these traumatic memories and histories of belonging shape not only activities classified as active aging, but also multiple domains of social life for older adults. Such insights are likely to be true not only for Poles, but also for older adults in other eastern European contexts, given the multiple forms of suffering through which these generations have lived. If policies promoting active aging—and civil society—explicitly considered the multiplicity of emotional valences of older Poles’ relations to the past, perhaps such policies could more successfully foster the meaningful social ties that lie at the heart of such initiatives.
Regardless of how inclusive policy makers intend the concept of active aging to be, there are some people who might not be reached by active aging programs or who would not share its aspirations. In addition to those who may continue to choose not to participate, older people living with chronic illness in institutional care or those with dementia remain at risk of exclusion from these programs. Indeed, it seems likely that no single social policy can reach all segments of the desired population, making it necessary to understand experiences of aging that fall outside the category of active aging. If active aging policies tend to reach certain segments of the population and not others, it is worth exploring how this exclusion might map onto or reinforce existing divisions within Polish society. In the contemporary context in which neoliberal ideals of individual responsibility dominate, it is especially important for policies to include already-existing multiple forms of responsibility and social relations—and their meanings and qualities in relation to the past. These nuanced perspectives are important to understand when promoting and conceptualizing civil society, a policy imperative with implications for segments of the population other than older adults.
Ethnographic data and analysis of other demographic changes within Polish society could be similarly beneficial for other domains of social policy. For instance, ethnographic analysis of the role of migration on care of the oldest generations, and the aging of generations that came of age after socialism, could suggest new paths for policy makers seeking to promote civil society and meaningful forms of life for contemporary Poles. In the current political context, in which debates about pension and health care policy loom large, data that shed light on the experiences, understandings, and expectations of such policies will help to promote a better fit between these polices and ways to live meaningful lives. Careful analysis of ethnographic data regarding the perspectives and lived experiences of Poland’s oldest generations could thus illuminate the promises and perils of demographic change that influences social policies.
