Ageing in rural areas as a mode of active ageing

Abstract

While there have been plenty of debates on the rural aspects of later life, we lack attention to how rurality influences the understanding of the key sociogerontological concepts such as active and healthy ageing. These concepts tend to focus mainly on formalised, economically productive, or self-development activities, typical for urban environments. Activities such as home and garden maintenance, the cultivation of useful plants, or animal husbandry are invisible in concepts of 'good' ageing and often go unrecognised as beneficial to the quality of later life as presented in the mainstream policy discourses. Resulting urban hegemony frames the rural as deficient, subordinate, and lagging behind in the quality of life.

We use qualitative interviews with older adults living in rural areas to build the concept of 'rural pursuits' and argue that it significantly enhances the well-being of older adults in rural areas and even 'compensates' the objective infrastructural deprivations, if present. Rural pursuits do not distinguish between work and leisure, have specific temporal dynamics, take commonplace throughout the day, change seasonally, allow for agentic disengagement, and are gendered, providing various opportunities for older women and men.

We conclude that although unrecognised by the recent dominant active and healthy ageing policy discourses, rural pursuits are the very embodiment of active ageing and expose the hegemonical understanding of heterogeneous lived experiences of heterogeneous older people living in heterogeneous environments.