In this article, Christina Victor looks at an issue that has not so far received a great deal of sociological research, namely ageing and care among black and minority ethnic (BME) populations in Britain. As she points out, the proportion of elderly people from BME groups is likely to grow in coming decades.
The article reveals the ‘fluidity’ of the concept of age, which to Westerners almost always refers to a person’s chronological age. In some BME groups the idea of having a fixed age based on your year of birth is seen as predominantly a Western concept. The author found that often her research subjects had two ages — their official ‘passport’ age, and an age based on their cultural experience — and that definitions of ‘old’ could vary between groups.
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