Introduction
This article addresses the question of what characterises the gerontologicalFootnote 1 imagination as far as ethnicity is concerned and presents the ways in which ethnicity scholarship makes sense of this construct.Footnote 2 At the core of the argument is the idea that although the understandings of ethnicity that inform scholarly work that specialises on ethnicity has evolved over the past few decades, the same cannot be said of gerontology's understanding of ethnicity. Worth noting from the start is that the ideas that will be presented here are not actually new. They do not, however, seem to have left a mark on gerontological research on ethnicity which is why I would argue that there is merit in opening up a dialogue about these issues. In globalised times such as ours, when ethnic diversity has increased as considerably as it has, there is a need to raise awareness about what different understandings of ethnicity can mean for the questions we pose, the data we collect and the interpretations of findings we are able to formulate. This paper aims therefore to do just that and hopes to ignite a discussion about the state of affairs of gerontology's understandings of ethnicity.
Defining ethnicity seems necessary since this is a term that is often used interchangeably with terms such as culture, raceFootnote 3 and minority (cf. Aspinall Reference Aspinall2007). This makes the usage of this term not always as clear-cut as it may seem at first glance. Vast amounts of literature have namely been dedicated to this construct's relationship to other constructs such as race and culture (see e.g. Castles Reference Castles2000; Cornell and Hartmann Reference Cornell and Hartmann1998; Jenkins Reference Jenkins1997). Covering the various definitions there are and the socio-historical contexts from which they originate is not possible within the word limits of a paper. Suffice it to say, at least by way of introduction, that ethnicity is the term utilised to denote the attachments between people that are based on common descent, which is why The HarperCollins Dictionary on Sociology defines ethnicity as ‘the shared (whether perceived or actual) racial, linguistic, or national identity of a social group’ (Jary and Jary Reference Jary and Jary1991: 151). This definition is relatively straightforward but is not necessarily a definition that contemporary ethnicity scholars would use. They would probably find the definition offered by Jenkins a lot more nuanced. He argues that
ethnicity is about cultural differentiation (bearing in mind that identity is always dialectic between similarity and difference); ethnicity is concerned with culture – shared meaning – but it is also rooted in, and the outcome of, social interaction; ethnicity is no more fixed than the culture of which it is a component, or the situations in which it is produced and reproduced; ethnicity is both collective and individual, externalized in social interaction and internalized in personal identification. (Jenkins Reference Jenkins1997: 165)
As such, and when aiming to differentiate between ethnicity and culture, it may be helpful to think of ethnicity as a background variable often used to denote the social group to which a person ‘belongs’ and to think of culture as the diverse ways that make this type of ‘belonging’ meaningful. Here it is necessary to stress that the reason why the word ‘belongs’ is written in inverted commas is because ethnic identity is always a situationally determined subjective matter. This is why Wallman (Reference Wallman1979) claims that the idea of perception is pivotal to our understanding of ethnicity since ‘ethnicity refers generally to the perception of group difference . . . and the sense of difference which can occur when members of a particular cultural . . . group interact with non-members’ (Wallman Reference Wallman1979, ix). Hence, the focus on categorisation and boundary making in the next section. Ethnicity is, after all, one of the most relied upon backgrounds when differentiation is at stake (cf. Cornell and Hartmann Reference Cornell and Hartmann1998).
Having given some insight into how ethnicity can be defined, it seems appropriate to state that another reason for this paper's raison d’être is that few efforts have been made to review systematically the gerontological literature on ethnicity. This means, therefore, that we know in fact very little about how ethnicity is conceptualised in gerontology. To this end it seems important to note that although it makes sense to assume that the exception to this statement must be the books that focus on ethnicity, this is not, in fact, the case (see e.g. Barressi and Stull Reference Barressi and Stull1993; Blakemore and Boneham Reference Blakemore and Boneham1994; Gelfand Reference Gelfand1994; Katz Olson Reference Katz Olson2001; Mehrotra and Wagner Reference Manthorpe, Iliffe, Moriarty, Cornes, Clough, Bright and Rapaport2009; Stanford and Torres-Gil Reference Stanford and Torres-Gil1992; Whitfield and Baker Reference Whitfield and Baker2014). Most gerontological books focusing on ethnicity are actually edited collections that lack a systematic review of research on ethnicity that focuses on ageing and old age as well as a clear conceptualisation of ethnicity. Thus, although one would expect that books on the subject would actually address understandings of ethnicity in a comprehensive enough manner, these books often lack introductory sections that define ethnicity and are comprised of chapters that conceptualise ethnicity in different ways, present findings on a single ethnic group and/or on a specific topic summarising what research on different ethnic groups suggests. As such, they leave us often with more questions than they actually answer as far as understandings of ethnicity are concerned; or as Kramer and Barker state, in a review of seven books on ‘ethnicity in the elderly’:
taken as a group, this collection of texts begs the question: how much do we actually know about ethnicity in the elderly . . . All the texts sidestep the dynamic qualities of culture and ethnicity and, in doing so, continue to sidestep the advancement of theory and methodology in social gerontology. (1994: 403)
Something else worth noting is that the few attempts that have been made to address the state of affairs of gerontological research on ethnicity have been efforts that have had limited scope, e.g. Dilworth-Anderson, Canty Williams and Gibson's (Reference Dilworth-Anderson, Canty Williams and Gibson2002) review of the gerontological literature on care-giving that addresses race, ethnicity and culture; Janevic and Connell's (Reference Janevic and Connell2001) review of the literature on dementia care-giving experience that addresses racial, ethnic and cultural differences; Pinquart and Sörensen's (Reference Pinquart and Sörensen2005) review on ethnic difference in stressors, resources and psychological outcomes of family care-giving; and Kwak and Haley's (Reference Kwak and Haley2005) review of the literature on end-of-life decision making among racially or ethnically diverse groups. One of the most recent reviews focuses, for example, on research that focuses on health and health care for older ethnic groups (e.g. Koehn et al. Reference Koehn, Neysmith, Kobayashi and Khamisa2013). On the basis of a scoping review of the research on health and health care for older people with minority backgrounds, Koehn et al. (2013: 439) argue that ‘theoretical perspectives that incorporate race/ethnicity/culture are not well-developed in the ageing literature even today’. They blame gerontologists' focus on single categories that hide the heterogeneity of ethnic groups and the reliance on methodologies that cannot address ‘the inherent complexity of the inter-relationships between markers of differences like ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender and immigration status' for the state of affairs (Koehn et al. Reference Koehn, Neysmith, Kobayashi and Khamisa2013: 456). A similar assessment was offered a decade earlier by Kramer and Barker who wrote that
on the elderly, ethnicity is presented largely as a fixed, static, invariant characteristic of individuals in homogenous social groups . . . All too often ‘ethnic’ research and analysis rely on this type of dated definition. (1994: 412)
In this paper, I will argue that addressing ethnicity in this fixed and dated manner inhibits gerontologists not only from fully exploiting the potential that data on ethnicity actually offers but also from asking research questions that resonate well with ethnicity scholarship. And yes, one could argue that gerontologists have their own interests and need not therefore take into account what ethnicity scholars find interesting when formulating their inquiries, but I beg to differ. A multi-disciplinary field like gerontology cannot disregard the advancements that are made in other fields if these are relevant to understandings of ageing and old age. Disregarding them means namely that gerontology could run the risk of losing its authority as far as the ageing (and old age) of ethnic groups are concerned. This paper engages, therefore, with ethnicity scholarship and argues that gerontology needs to broaden its understanding of ethnicity.
It seems appropriate to spell out a caveat to avoid misinterpretation and that is that by suggesting that gerontology needs to broaden its understandings in this respect, I am not suggesting that the work gerontologists do on ethnicity is without merit. The argument is therefore not that gerontologists should abandon the understandings of ethnicity that inform their inquiries but rather that time has come for us to consider the limitations that our understandings pose to the gerontological imagination on ethnicity. The paper ends by suggesting that the social constructionist approach to ethnicity and the notion of intersectionality are unexploited sources of inspiration for gerontology's research on ethnicity. In global times when diversity has become the norm as opposed to the exception and when the presence of the Rest in the West can no longer be disregarded (Torres Reference Torres, Baars, Dannefer, Phillipson and Walker2006a, Reference Torres and Phellas2013, Torres and Lawrence Reference Torres and Lawrence2012), we need understandings of ethnicity that take for granted the hybridity of backgrounds that characterise ageing populations just as we need to address the circumstances that make such backgrounds matter for gerontological research, policy and practice.
Ethnicity as the basis for categorisation, boundary making and ‘Othering’
In order to understand what ethnic backgrounds can mean in terms of how we regard ourselves and others, it is necessary to describe why categorisation is so central to the way in which we perceive and understand the people we meet, the places we visit, the situations we find ourselves in and the experiences we gain throughout life. Social psychologists define categorisation as ‘the process of understanding what something is by knowing what other things it is equivalent to, and what other things it is different from’ (McGarty Reference McGarty1999: 1). This process is something we do routinely and automatically, and for the most part without noticing it at all. The reason why categorisation is so central to how we process information is that our ability to take in and process information is limited. We need shortcuts, and categorisation is just such a shortcut. It is because we sort information into different categories that we can rather quickly determine (or at least think that we can determine) which bits of information are important and which ones are not. Worth noting is also that we primarily make use of broad social categories (such as class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and age) when we categorise the people we meet. With regards to ethnicity, the questions we ask have to do with where people come from geographically, culturally, language-wise or in terms of religion. Using these broad clues as our starting point, we tend then to build impressions about their character and (within gerontological research and practice I would argue) about their needs. The shortcuts that categorisation imply (i.e. from the posing of questions about social categories to the assumptions we make about what the answers to these questions say about who we are dealing with) is one of the reasons why social psychologists have argued that the categorisation of people is more complicated than the categorisation of, for example, places, objects or contexts. The former always affects how we view ourselves. When we categorise people as either members of a group that we ourselves do or do not belong to, we are, after all, not only deciding if they belong to our ‘us’ or to their ‘them’, we are also in fact drawing a boundary between the ‘we’ with which we identify and the ‘them’ that we regard as different (Tajfel et al. Reference Tajfel, Billigm, Bundy and Flament1971).
In this respect it is important to stress that when we draw boundaries between different categories of people we are most often looking for differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’. As such, Anthias (Reference Anthias1998) has argued that categorisation and the drawing of boundaries that follow the categorisation process are both mechanisms we use when constructing ‘Otherness and sameness’. In globalised times, when diversity between and within groups is greater, it is particularly important to ask how we go about drawing boundaries between categories and whether or not members of different groups are more similar to one another than we might have expected. In societies that are relatively homogenous as far as ethnicity is concerned, it is not uncommon for the ethnic backgrounds that we ascribe to others to coincide with the ones that they assign to themselves. This is not the case, however, in multicultural societies where ethnic backgrounds can be quite multifaceted. It is, in other words, not always the case that there is a correspondence between the categories one is thought to fit into (i.e. the ones we ascribed to ourselves based on one's traits and national, linguistic, cultural, ethnic and religious background) and the categories others use to define us (i.e. the ones that others assign to us). There are, in other words, consequences for perception and interaction when we draw a boundary between those who belong to the ‘we’ we identify with and the ‘them’ we assume to be different from us. This is one of the reasons why we often hold rather stereotyped conceptions of those who do not belong to the groups with which we identify. It is for all of these reasons that the categorisation of people on the basis of broad social categories such as ethnicity can be problematic. Categorisation must therefore be understood not only as a useful and innocent shortcut used for sorting information, but also as a mechanism that has consequences for social interaction. Categorisation is, in other words, consequential but the consequences look different depending upon the way in which we understand the categories we use and the relevance we accord to them.
Having given some insight into why categorisation is so central to the way in which we think about ethnicity, it seems important to draw attention to the notion of ‘Othering’ which is often used to denote how boundaries between the Self and Others are created through categorisation (cf. Anthias Reference Anthias1998). ‘Othering’ practices reinforce our understanding of normality and denote difference as deviance. Understood this way, ‘Othering’ is one of the fundamental processes involved in the reproduction of inequality since ‘Othering’ practices are about ‘the defining into existence of a group of people who are identifiable, from the standpoint of a group with the capacity to dominate, as inferior’ (Schwalbe Reference Schwalbe2000: 777). Hall argues that in order for us to understand how ethnic ‘Others’ are described, refer to and talked about we need to understand that difference matters because, for one thing, ‘it is essential to meaning . . . [and] because we can only construct meaning through a dialogue with the “Other”’ (1997: 234–5). He states also that ‘it is only through the relation to the Other, the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called its constitutive outside that the “positive” meaning of any term – and thus its “identity” – can be constructed’ (Hall Reference Hall, Hall and du Gay1996: 4–5). ‘Othering’ is therefore believed to be central to boundary making since ‘the universality of ethnic forms’ feeds on the idea of boundaries (cf. Wimmer Reference Wimmer2008).
To this end, it seems important to draw attention to Pickering – who has disentangled the theoretical roots of our conceptualisations of stereotyping and ‘Othering’ – and who argues that ‘conceptions of the Other and the structures of differences and similarity which they mobilize do not [however] exist in any natural form at all … the location of the Other is primarily in language’ (2001: 72). In this respect, it seems worth pointing out that those who engage in ‘Othering’ practices are seldom aware that they are engaging in them. This is important to keep in mind because although ‘Othering’ is by some believed to be an inevitable process, the ways in which we construct ‘Others’ as different can take numerous forms (cf. Wimmer Reference Wimmer2008). It is, in other words, through the ways we refer to and talk about the ‘Other’ that their Otherness is constituted. Pickering (Reference Pickering2001: 72) argues therefore that ‘the symbolically constructed “Other” and the patterns of social exclusion and incorporation entailed by it are distributed in sign and language, discourse and representation’. This is worth noting since – as critical scholars within health and social care sciences have begun to point out (cf. Pon Reference Pon2009; Wear et al. Reference Wear, Kumagai, Varley and Zarconi2012) – one of the problems associated with the literature on culture-appropriate care (and the same could be said about some of the gerontological literature on practice and ethnicity, see e.g. Brotman Reference Brotman2003) is that it assumes that ‘the Other’ does exist and that their difference can be made intelligible if one only understands the logic behind their peculiarities. Thus, ‘Othering’ practices utilise essentialist understandings of ethnicity not only to bring to the fore notions of difference but also to designate that which is peculiar or deviant. As such, these practices set in motion the patterns of exclusion that demarcate the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘Othering’ is therefore the notion that brings to the fore the ways in which ideas about ‘Others’ get translated into practices that segment the differences that these ideas take for granted.
Making sense of why ethnicity matters: theoretical perspectives from ethnicity scholarship
This section focuses on how ethnicity has been understood by ethnicity scholars over the past few decades. By alluding to how their understandings of ethnicity have evolved, this section aims to suggest that much could be gained if gerontology's own understandings of ethnicity were to evolve as well.
The essentialist/primordial perspective
The essentialist or primordial perspective was the first perspective behavioural and social scientists applied to ethnicity. Its roots can be found in the latter half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The crux of this perspective is that it views this background as something that conditions us. The version of the essentialist perspective most often discussed by social scientists today is the one introduced by Isaac in the mid-1970s.Footnote 4 According to Isaac, ethnic backgrounds are a matter of: phenotypical traits (the way one looks, one's body size and shape, eye colour, etc.); personal names (both the individual's and the family's); the history and origins of the group into which one was born; one's nationality; one's first language; the religion into which one was born; the culture into which one was born; the geographic and topographic features of the place where one was born (Isaac Reference Isaac1975). Isaac considered these things to be important because they are the things that happen to us first (i.e. that happen to us before we are able to choose which is why this perspective is often referred to as the primordial perspective). Isaac argued therefore that ethnic backgrounds are unchangeable. This understanding of ethnicity is still relatively common, in that we often tend to draw conclusions about people based on the backgrounds we ascribe to them, thereby making a connection between ethnicity and character, i.e. assuming that someone is one thing or the other because he/she has a certain ethnic and cultural background. Thus, by presupposing that people's ethnic backgrounds shape who they are, we are in fact assuming that the cultural values they uphold and the primary socialisation they received dictate who they are (or could become) as individuals. The problem with this assumption is, of course, that some people assign no importance to their ethnic background and do not always regard themselves as people who are determined by them. Another problem with this perspective is that – in light of what we learned earlier regarding categorisation's implications for how we perceive different groups – the way in which we as out-group members assume that ethnicity is meaningful for a certain group may not resonate well with the meaning that group's members attach to this background. Finally, but no less importantly, the essentialist perspective has been questioned because it cannot explain the fact that the importance of ethnicity changes over time and across contexts and that it can be valued differently by people who belong to the same category. It is for all of these reasons that most ethnicity scholars have long abandoned this perspective as the explanatory model for research on how and why ethnicity matters. This is the case even though most ethnicity scholars acknowledge that the essentialist perspective on ethnicity is still rampant in policy and practice.
The structuralist/circumstantialist perspective
The structuralist perspective on ethnicity is sometimes called circumstantialism – a vivid term that gets at the crux of the matter, which is that circumstances determine the meaning that ethnicity takes on. Central to this perspective is the assumption that the implications that ethnic background can have can either be understood in terms of the advantages or disadvantages that these backgrounds entail in different contexts (Cornell and Hartmann Reference Cornell and Hartmann1998). From this perspective, what is most important about ethnic backgrounds is the access to certain resources which would be out of reach without them. Cornell and Hartmann write, for example, that
common to circumstantialist approaches, regardless of the degree to which they focus on interests or instrumentality, is the idea that ethnic groups are largely the products of concrete social and historical situations that – for a variety of reasons – heighten or reduce the salience and/or utility of ethnic and racial identities . . . sometimes circumstances even create new group ties by placing previously unassociated persons or groups in common situations over extended periods . . . in the circumstantialist view ethnicity and race are dependent variables. They are less independent forces than products of other forces, less creators of circumstances or situations than products of them. (1998: 60)
Thus, central to the structuralist/circumstantialist perspective on ethnicity is the notion that people can choose to accentuate and/or undermine the importance of their own (and others') ethnic backgrounds depending on the context in which they find themselves. Based on these understandings, it is commonly stated that whereas the essentialist perspective regards ethnic background as something that determines who we are (as the independent variable), the structuralist perspective regards this background as important because of what it can mean for what we have (or lack) (i.e. the dependent variable). Thus, as the name of this perspective implies, this understanding of ethnicity focuses on the resources and scopes of action that are available (or out of reach) to us depending on our ethnic background (cf. Yancey, Ericksen and Juliani Reference Yancey, Ericksen and Juliani1976). In other words, this perspective takes for granted that ethnic background can sometimes bring about a disadvantageous position and sometimes an advantageous one.
The structuralist/circumstantialist perspective has been criticised for its allegation that the importance of ethnicity is entirely determined by context since it is somewhat naive to assume that it is only circumstances that are decisive. Nevertheless, this is what the structuralist perspective proposes, because it considers that the changeability in how we understand ethnicity is tied to the contexts that make ethnicity meaningful, which is why the importance of ethnicity can sometimes be stressed and sometimes toned down. Thus, making a comparison we can say that whereas the essentialist perspective sees ethnicity as something fixed and unchangeable because it is primordial in nature, the structuralist perspective sees this background as ‘fluid and contingent and, therefore, as ultimately ephemeral’ (Cornell and Hartmann Reference Cornell and Hartmann1998: 67). In this respect, it seems important to mention that they have warned ethnicity scholars from discarding either one of these perspectives and have argued that both of these perspectives are needed if we are to understand how important this background can be to people's identity (which is what the essentialist perspective is thought to be able to explain) and that the socio-historical context is of importance to how we understand ethnicity and what ethnic relations can look like (which is a structuralist explanation).
The social constructionist perspective
Last but not least in our series of perspectives on ethnicity is the social constructionist perspective, which is the approach that most often informs ethnicity scholarship today. One of the fundamental lines of thought underlying this perspective is Barth's (1969) argument that the ethnicity others ascribe to us and the ethnicity we claim for ourselves are of importance when discussing what ethnicity entails and what ethnic relations look like. Barth argues that ethnic groups emerge in the interaction between attribution or ascription – what others claim we are – and self-assertion – i.e. who we claim to be. It is for this reason that he has argued that the relevance of ethnic backgrounds is always contextually dependent (Barth Reference Barth1969, 1989). Thus, when ethnicity is understood on the basis of the social constructionist perspective the focus shifts to how ethnicity is made into something significant and when and how it is allowed to play a determinative role in our lives. Understood in this way, ethnicity is assumed to be one of the parameters that we use in order to draw boundaries but because ethnic boundaries are almost always fluid, the ‘we’ that we invoke when we describe ‘them’ is always just as shifting as the ‘them’ that we describe when ‘we’ try to separate ourselves from ‘the Other’. This is what Barth (Reference Barth1969) means when he argues that the definition of who ‘the Other’ is, is always contingent upon who ‘we’ are assumed to be. The boundaries between ethnic and cultural groups are thus permeable precisely because they are situational.
This explains why ethnicity scholars often talk about ethnicity as something that can, to some degree, be negotiated in interaction. Jenkins (Reference Jenkins1997, Reference Jenkins2000) usually calls this the negotiable nature of ethnicity, which implies that ethnicity is negotiated in social contexts through one's own definition of oneself – a definition one lays claim to when trying to answer the question of who one is – and the external definition others ascribe to one. However, the fact that ethnicity can be negotiated does not mean that all claims on negotiation are acceptable. The negotiable nature of this background requires that others accept the claims that we make. In other words, the question of the negotiable nature of ethnicity is tied to what happens when one makes claims on an identity that others are not prepared to recognise. There are, in other words, limits to how much we can re-negotiate our backgrounds, and these limits are determined by who we negotiate with, the type of context we negotiate in and where on the historical timeline the negotiation takes place. Thus, boundaries between ethnic groups are conditioned by the social interaction and the context in which they are drawn.
The social constructionist perspective takes, in other words, for granted that ethnic backgrounds are important not only because both ourselves and others sometimes insist on taking for granted that this background matters but also because this background can open opportunities in some occasions and close them in others. Cornell and Hartmann have argued, therefore, that the constructionist approach
focuses on the ways ethnic and racial identities are built, rebuilt and sometimes dismantled over time. It places interactions between circumstances and groups at the heart of these processes. It accepts the fundamental validity of circumstantialism while attaining to retain the key insights of primordialism, but it adds to them a large dose of activism: the contribution groups make to creating and shaping their own identities. (1998: 72)
This is why constructionist scholars of ethnicity regard what we do as the most important determinant of what this background means. In other words, this perspective does not see ethnicity as a designation or a category that a person can be forced into, but it presupposes that we have a certain degree of power to accept, refuse, negotiate and specify when and how this designation will influence us. Yuval-Davis (Reference Yuval-Davis2010: 266) phrases this rather poignantly when she writes that ‘belonging tends to be naturalised and becomes articulated and politicised only when it is threatened in some way’. Social constructionists assume, in other words, that it is not only background and circumstances that determine how we regard and experience ethnicity, but also how we relate to the situations in which we find ourselves. Phrased in the crudest of ways, one could say that ethnicity does not matter unless somebody lets it matter. Thus, the social constructionist perspective takes for granted that ethnicity can be experienced as fixed when people choose (and/or are forced) to identify themselves with their ethnic background in order to create meaning. To this end, Nagel (Reference Nagel1994: 167–8) argues that ‘for ethnic groups, questions of history, membership, and culture are the problematics solved by the construction process. Whether ethnic divisions are built upon visible biological differences among populations or rest upon invisible cultural and ideational distinctions, the boundaries around and the meanings attached to ethnic groups reflect pure social constructions'. This means that if ‘we can recognize ethnicity as a way of making up people, we can examine the social effects of this way of making up people yet not lose sight of the fact that ethnicity is simply a way of making up people’ (Carter and Fenton Reference Carter and Fenton2010: 9–10).
According to Cornell and Hartmann (Reference Cornell and Hartmann1998), there are two factors that are particularly decisive for how ethnicity is given meaning and these are the situations in which various groups find themselves and the resources and traits they take with them into these situations. According to them, there are different construction sites that are of particular interest if one wishes to understand how ethnic groups are constructed in one way or another (i.e. how conceptions of them can be tied to certain traits or behaviours). These scholars have argued also that the political sphere (or political debates and discussions), the labour market, people's neighbourhoods, various social institutions, and the cultural sphere and daily experience are the sites where constructions of ethnicity take shape (i.e. the spheres in which different assumptions about ethnicity are made). What makes these contexts particularly interesting is that people form their identity within these sites and make claims on resources and scopes of action of various types within them. This is why I suggest that gerontological research, policy and practice could be regarded as construction sites where ethnicity's importance is addressed. It is within these old age-relevant sites that constructions about ethnicity's relevance are shaped and assumptions about ethnicity are made. Thus, it seems necessary to allude to gerontology's own perspective on ethnicity by asking: which understandings of ethnicity inform contemporary gerontology?
Gerontology's understandings of ethnicity
This section aims to describe some of the main trends observed in contemporary gerontological research on ethnicity. As already stated but worth reiterating, this paper does not aim to provide a comprehensive review of gerontological perspectives on ethnicity. The focus here lies instead in raising gerontologists' awareness of how understandings of ethnicity have evolved over the past few decades and what this could mean for gerontology's own understandings of ethnicity. Reviewing the gerontological literature on ethnicity has been, however, necessary since it is difficult to argue that gerontology could benefit from expanding its imagination if we do not know what characterises research on ethnicity in gerontology. Thus, this sectionFootnote 5 is based on an inventory of the last 15 years of research in gerontology that has been published in some of the major journals in social gerontology (Ageing & Society, The Gerontologist, The Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, Journal of Aging Studies and the Journal of Cross-cultural Gerontology)Footnote 6 and make claims to contribute to knowledge on ethnicity.Footnote 7 The choice to focus on the last 15 years is based on the fact that it is mostly in the mid- to late 1990s that ethnicity scholars can be claimed to have abandoned the essentialist approach, so it seemed appropriate to see if the evolution of understandings of ethnicity in their scholarship had left any traces in the gerontological literature. I chose to focus on papers published in journals in social gerontology because this is the sub-field of gerontological inquiry where one would expect that the developments in ethnicity scholarship described in the previous section could have left a mark.Footnote 8
With the description of the limited scope of the review that informs this specific section now in place, it seems first necessary to mention a couple of things about ethno-gerontology which is the sub-field of gerontological inquiry that focuses on ethnicity. Ethno-gerontological imagination was originally awoken by an interest in the implications that cultural values and societal contexts could have for the way in which ageing is experienced and understood (Torres Reference Torres and Stuart-Hamilton2011, Reference Torres, Twigg and Martin2014). The fact that gerontological research on ethnicity tends to take for granted that ethnicity determines who we are and that insights into who ‘the Other’ is can allow us to address the boundaries that exist between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (cf. Drevdahl, Phillips and Taylor Reference Drevdahl, Phillips and Taylor2006) is therefore understandable. Against this backdrop, it is also not surprising that one of the main trends noted as far as gerontology's understandings of ethnicity are concerned is that the essentialist perspective is the perspective that seems to inform gerontological scholarship the most. This was suggested by the authors cited in the book reviews alluded to in the introduction, but since these were reviews from the mid-1990s it is interesting to note that the last 15 years do not seem to have brought about changes in this regard. The papers reviewed in this section show rather clearly that most gerontological research on ethnicity is informed by the essentialist/primordialist understanding of ethnicity, meaning that ethnicity is determined a priori through researchers' assignment and that it is often taken to mean that background determine people's preferences, behaviours and conditions, e.g. Quine (Reference Quine1999) on health concerns; Braun, Tanji and Heck (Reference Braun, Tanji and Heck2001) on support for physician-assisted suicide; Peng, Navaie-Waliser and Feldman (Reference Peng, Navaie-Waliser and Feldman2003) on social support and home health service use; Bajekal et al. (Reference Bajekal, Blane, Grewal, Karlsen and Nazroo2004) on quality of life; Wray (Reference Wray2007) on mid-life; Bowen and Gonzalez (Reference Bowen and Gonzalez2008) on the use of health-care services and functional disability; Liang et al. (Reference Liang, Xu, Bennett, Ye and Quinones2009) on functional health; Lawrence et al. (Reference Lawrence, Samsi, Banerjee, Morgan and Murray2010) on the experience of dementia; Schans and Komter (Reference Schans and Komter2010) on patterns of intergenerational solidarity; Victor, Burholt and Martin (Reference Victor, Burholt and Martin2012) on loneliness; Alpass et al. (Reference Alpass, Pond, Stephens, Stevenson, Keeling and Towers2013) on care-giver health; and Laditka et al. (Reference Laditka, Laditka, Liu, Price, Friedman, Wu, Bryant, Corwin and Ivey2013) on descriptions of cognitive impairment. Worth noting is perhaps that this understanding of ethnicity has been described by ethnicity scholars as ‘research-asserted’ (Bradby Reference Bradby2003). Thus, although the essentialist understanding of ethnicity has long been problematised by ethnicity scholars, this seems still to be the understanding that informs the gerontological literature the most. This suggests that not much has changed since Green – in a book review essay commenting on five books on ethnicity and ageing – argued that ethnicity tends to be
thought of as a set of attributes, historical residues continuing on as ornamental custom or, for those in multiple jeopardy, as stigmata. As one among many ‘traits’ ethnicity is marked and measured as a variable, one sometimes strongly represented in statistical outcomes and sometimes not. (1989: 378)
The results of the review performed to inform this section – which is based on a much larger set of contemporary publications than the book reviews mentioned in the introduction – suggests that the advancements made in ethnicity scholarship have not left a mark as far as gerontology's understandings of ethnicity are concerned.
Not all gerontological research is, however, solely informed by the essentialist/primordialist understanding. The formulation of the double-jeopardy hypothesis (Dowd and Bengtson Reference Dowd and Bengtson1978; Jackson, Kolody and Wood Reference Jackson, Kolody, Wood and Manuel1982) and the age-as-levelling hypothesis (Kent Reference Kent1971) back in the late 1970s and early 1980s are two examples of gerontological perspectives on ethnicity that have been informed by the structuralist/circumstantialist perspective. The review performed here shows also that more recent examples of how this understanding permeates the gerontological debate can be found in Dunlop et al. (Reference Dunlop, Manheim, Song and Chang2002) who have studied ethnic disparities in health-care utilisation; Moriarty and Butt (Reference Moriarty and Butt2004) who have studied inequalities in quality of life; Williams (Reference Williams2005) who has studied the health of ethnic populations in the United States of America; Fiori, Consedine and Magai (Reference Fiori, Consedine and Magai2008) who have studied ethnic differences in patterns of social exchange; and Haas, Krueget and Rohlfsen (Reference Haas, Krueget and Rohlfsen2012) who have studied race/ethnic disparities on physical performance. Characteristics of gerontological research that apply the structuralist/circumstantialist perspective on ethnicity is that they seek to bring light into the disparities that ethnicity can bring about through the study of the socio-economic differentials that lie at the core of inequalities.
Last but not least, we have the social constructionist understanding of ethnicity that informs most contemporary scholarship on ethnicity but which does not seem to inform the gerontological literature on ethnicity to any greater extent; not at least if we are going to go by the results of the review performed here. In the limited review that informs this section, only two papers seem to have been informed by this understanding: Koehn (Reference Koehn2009) on how ethnic minority seniors negotiate candidacy in order to access care services and McMullin (Reference McMullin2000) who writes about the state of sociological ageing theory as far as diversity is concerned and the fact that gerontology has yet to embrace the advancements that have been made as far as conceptualisations of diversity are concerned. Worth noting is that I write ‘seem to have been informed’ instead of ‘is informed’ because the one empirical paper found (Koehn Reference Koehn2009) does not, in fact, spell out which understanding of ethnicity it departs from. The paper does, however, discuss its finding in a manner that takes into account both the ways in which essentialist ideas about ethnic groups impede people from accessing services as well as the manner in which older people with ethnic minority backgrounds can find themselves in circumstances that augment their needs. As such, it follows the line of reasoning underlining the social constructionist understanding of ethnicity. It is for this reason that I find this paper to be one of the ones that applies an understanding of ethnicity that seems informed by the complexities that assignment and ascription of ethnicity can mean to people's lives. McMullin's (Reference McMullin2000) paper stands out from the papers reviewed in this section in that it is a theoretical paper which argues that gerontologists' failure to address inequality in a theoretically informed way is not the result of an oversight on their part but rather of the fact that ‘aging theories need to be rethought to be better suited for diversity research’ (McMullin Reference McMullin2000: 517). Thus, although this paper (and the papers it builds on such as Calasanti and Zajicek Reference Calasanti and Zajicek1993 and Calasanti Reference Calasanti1996) do not focus exclusively on ethnicity, it does allude to the ways in which gerontology's understandings of ethnicity have yet to conceptualise these backgrounds as ‘sets of social relations, characterised by power, that are fundamental structures or organising features of social life … [this] involves moving beyond the view that these are individual characteristics that create difference’ (McMullin Reference McMullin2000: 525); or as Calasanti (Reference Calasanti1996) argues, our understandings of ethnicity need to move beyond the content orientation to diversity (which merely asks ‘does race matter’?) to an approach to diversity that is more inquisitive (which would mean asking why does ‘membership in one racial/ethnic group rather than another matter’?).
The review performed in this section is limited so it is very possible that there are other studies informed by the social constructivist understanding of ethnicity in the gerontological literature to which this review did not bring attention. It is, however, quite telling that there are large differences in the understandings of ethnicity that dominate the literature; and it is because of this that I would argue – albeit preliminarily until a comprehensive inventory of the literature is performed – that the evidence reviewed here does not attest to gerontology being in tune with the developments that have taken place in ethnicity scholarship.
The social constructionist perspective and the notion of intersectionality as sources of inspiration
So far, I have implicitly argued that in order for the gerontological imagination to be expanded as far as ethnicity is concerned we need to seriously address how gerontological research construct ethnic ‘Others’. A similar suggestion has been made by Williams and Wilson (Reference Williams, Wilson, Binstock and George2001), who suggest that gerontologists need to become more self-critical about their reasons for collecting and analysing data on ethnicity as well as how they go about making sense of their findings. Thus, it is hereby proposed that gerontologists need to expand their focus from the what of ethnicity which is what the essentialist perspective brings attention to (i.e. what ethnic backgrounds mean to different old age and ageing-related issues) to the when and how of ethnicity which is what the social constructionist perspective brings to the fore (i.e. under which circumstances and within which contexts these backgrounds are expected to mean something and how). Expanding our focus will allow us to bring to the fore the assumptions about difference that these constructions build on. To this end, it seems worth reiterating what was stated in the introduction; namely that when we talk about and regard individuals or groups as ‘Other’, we are engaging in practices that imply the distancing and stigmatisation of these groups. Moreover, when we fall into the simplistic and dated understanding of ethnicity as something that is ‘primordial’ to people, we run the risk of regarding ethnic groups as homogenous populations and can fail to disentangle what is brought about by ethnicity and what is determined by other resource differentials such as gender and class. The essentialisation of ethnicity involves also the over-generalisation of the differences that exist between ethnic groups and can lead, albeit inadvertently, not only to the perpetuation of stereotypical assumptions about what characterises different groups (and what constitutes their needs) but also to the disregard of the structural conditions that bring to fore these differences (Johnson et al. Reference Johnson, Bottorff, Browne, Grewal, Ann Hilton and Clarke2004). From the essentialist understanding of ethnicity follows also the assumption that the way in which certain ethnic groups reason is the norm while others' take on things are aberrations that beg explanation; an assumption that has been shown to be rampant, for example, in the gerontological debate on successful ageing (cf. Torres Reference Torres2003). This is what Calasanti and Zajicek (Reference Calasanti and Zajicek1993) call the ‘normative referent’ which means that certain groups are the norm to which other groups are compared and deemed ‘deviant’ (cf. Calasanti Reference Calasanti1996). This line of reasoning has led gerontologists to create separate models for those who are regarded as ‘Others’ or to mistakenly think that they can treat ‘Others’ in a neutral manner. With regards to gender, she claims, for example, that this approach is especially insidious as it appears to be ‘gender neutral’ because ‘we are treating women the same as men’ and thus the research is ‘objective’ and ‘fair’. But in actuality this strategy translates into ‘we are treating women as if they were men’ (Calasanti and Zajicek Reference Blakemore and Boneham1993 118). Here I am arguing that the same could be said when it comes to ethnicity since the essentialist understanding of ethnicity that guides gerontological research at present augments the differences that exist between ethnic groups, obscures the similarities between them and takes for granted that only ethnic minorities ‘have ethnicity’.
In this regard, it seems worth noting that the essentialist understanding of ethnicity has implications for the way in which we formulate policies and practices that are meant to address the needs of those often regarded as ethnic ‘Others’. The idea that the needs of different ethnic groups can be regarded as aberrations from the norm underlie, for example, gerontological policy and practice that focuses on the creation of ethnicity-sensitive or culturally relevant services and on ‘individual communication and understanding between formal service providers and clients rather than on exposing and altering institutional structures and power relations marked by racism’ (Brotman Reference Brotman2003: 209). To this end it seems appropriate to bring attention to James (Reference James1996) who has critically assessed the ways in which the ideology of multiculturalism has been translated into health and social care practices and argues that organisations that deliver services based on this ideology tend to mistakenly take for granted that society is democratic and egalitarian, that citizens have freedom of choice, that most people value autonomy and individual responsibility, and that racism is the result of ignorance and can be easily eradicated through increased knowledge about ‘the Other’. From these assumptions follows also the idea that power struggles are the result of biases and prejudices as opposed to being an innate character of institutional settings which inhibits the formulation of policy and practice that actually address the kind of oppression, discrimination and marginalisation that some ethnic ‘Others’ experience in relation to health and social care institutions (Johnson et al. Reference Johnson, Bottorff, Browne, Grewal, Ann Hilton and Clarke2004; Manthorpe et al. Reference Manthorpe, Iliffe, Moriarty, Cornes, Clough, Bright and Rapaport2009). Related to this is Brotman's argument that
multiculturalism in elder care institutions is largely practiced from a cultural competence model in which the primacy of language narrowly constructs institutional priorities . . . defining communication between workers and clients as the site of access barriers . . . locating the ‘problem’ in the individual renders the role of systems and institutions in creating this problem, invisible. It also identifies the client as ‘deviant’ for not being able to adapt to Western culture and language. (2003: 225)
Thus, when the essentialist understanding of ethnicity – which is at the very core of the ideology of multiculturalism that informs most elderly care services that cater to older ethnic groups – dictates the way in which policy and practice is formulated, we run the risk of failing to formulate anti-racist agendas that actually address the oppression that some older ethnic ‘Others’ experience.
Focusing on how gerontology constructs ethnic ‘Others’ (not only through research which is the focus here but also through policy and practice) can aid us in developing the gerontological imagination by drawing attention to the fact that our own ‘doings’ as gerontologists can ‘create’ the ethnic (minority, racial and ‘diverse’) groups into which we divide the ageing population and the parameters through which their ‘difference’ is defined (cf. Torres Reference Torres2006b who has studied how the Swedish research, debate and policy on elderly immigrants constructs them as ethnic ‘Others’). Phrased in the language used in the debate on gerontological theorising, one could say that gerontology's understandings of ethnicity have yet to embark into the second transformation of thinking (e.g. Lynnott and Lynnott Reference Lynnott and Lynnott1996); a transformation that entails the turning of the ‘critical lens inward, to focus on researchers' own assumptions (and) on their production of empirical facts' (Bengtson, Parrott and Burgess Reference Bengtson, Parrott and Burgess1996: 771; see also Bengtson, Burgess and Parrott Reference Bengtson, Burgess and Parrott1997). This transformation – which I hereby argue could be done through social constructionism in relation to ethnicity – would not only allow us to understand how research (the questions we pose, the categories into which we group people, the data we collect and the interpretations we make) constructs the ethnic groups we focus on but also the implications that these constructions have for policy and practice. Moreover, embracing the social constructionist understanding of ethnicity in gerontology will also allow us to shed light on the ageing and old age-related circumstances that render ethnicity important; the processes through which these circumstances come to matter (or are contested); the assumptions that these circumstances make (cf. Nagel Reference Nagel1994); and the ways through which people use established conceptualisations of ethnicity to their advantage. To this end, it seems necessary to draw attention to Green (Reference Green1989: 383), who argues that ‘a more powerful ethnogerontology would be one in which the emergent quality of ethnicity, its salience rather than its giveness, would be the starting point’.
Related to salience – or the when and how of ethnicity as social constructionists often say – is the idea of intersectionality; an idea that draws attention to the multiple positioning that characterises power relations between people. IntersectionalityFootnote 9 – which is a term coined by Crenshaw (Reference Crenshaw1989) and launched in the early 1990s within gender studiesFootnote 10 – is a term that ‘foregrounds a richer and more complex ontology than approaches that attempt to reduce people to one category at a time’ (Phoenix Reference Phoenix2006: 187). As Crenshaw (Reference Crenshaw1991) has argued, intersectionality constitutes a critical alternative to identity politics because it focuses not only on differences between groups but also on differences within them.Footnote 11 Staunaes (Reference Staunaes2003) posits, in turn, that intersectionality draws attention to the interconnections between traditional background categories such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and age, and offers a more fruitful way of understanding the implications of these categories for people's lives. The reason why this is the case is that intersectional analyses draw attention to different sources of subordination/oppression and the fact that these seldom operate on their own. As such, these analyses are ‘based on the premise that the impact of a particular source of subordination may vary, depending on its combination with other sources of subordination (or of relative privilege)’ (Denis Reference Denis2008: 677). This type of analysis rejects, therefore, the assumption that one subordination source has primacy over others. Related to this is Staunaes' argument that ‘social categories are not the cause of certain behaviour but rather the effect of certain behaviour’ (2003: 104), which is why she urges social scientists to study ‘the doing of intersectionality . . . the doing of relations between categories, the outcome of this doing and how this doing results in either troubled or untroubled subject positions' (2003: 105). Intersectional analyses are, in other words, assumed to ‘solve one of the fundamental problems of migration (and I would argue ethnicity) research: how to reconcile structure and agency without promoting cultural essentialism’ (Bürkner 2012: 181).Footnote 12
Launching ethno-gerontological studies that are informed by intersectionality would allow us to study the multiple sources of oppression in old age to which some ethnic ‘Others’ are subjected and the privilege that some of them are accorded. The social constructionist perspective poses namely that being ascribed with an ethnic minority background should not a priori be assumed to entail disadvantage. Under certain circumstances ethnic minority backgrounds can become an asset and the question is when and how do they come to imply privilege (or disadvantage). Thus, when we essentialise ethnicity we run the risk of formulating policies and practices that ‘elevate specific location categories of belonging, assume a necessary and homogenous narrative of primordial or quasi-primordial (that is “strategic”) attachment to social groupings . . . and demand . . . loyalty as a matter of course’ (Yuval-Davis Reference Yuval-Davis2010: 266). Such policies and practices are bound to be irrelevant since they do not address the complexities that different backgrounds entail. Addressing the ways in which ethnicity intersects with class, gender, sexuality and age is thus necessary not only for the advancement of gerontological research on ethnicity but also for the formulation of appropriate and relevant policies and practices that address the needs of those regarded as ethnic ‘Others’.
