Ageing and succession

It is a commonplace that humans are aware of ageing and mortality as their lot. This consciousness is closely linked to our facility for language, with its intrinsic qualities of abstraction and its formal recognition of time through tense and other mechanisms. It is equally well known, however, that this universal area of experience and imagination can be given different cultural and social emphases. Formal groupings based on age and generation, for example, are quite rare, despite the widespread recognition of these principles of seniority in kinship systems. Similarly, interest in the relations between generations, as one ages and another starts to replace it, varies considerably from one society to another. The existence of important property to be transmitted is clearly one of several elements which can significantly affect such variation.

These matters were brought sharply to my notice during work in eastern Finland. My own focus on inter-generational relations and succession was essentially academic, developed in research in Africa and, more broadly, through my reading of a range of esoteric texts by writers such as Maine, Fortes and Goody. It was therefore interesting to find a number of ‘applied’ Finnish studies, largely designed for farmers, of what villagers and academics alike there call sukupolvenvaihdos (literally ‘change of generation’). One, published commercially, was readily available in the small country bookshop which served the rural area where I was working.