Billiards, Rhythms, Collectives Billiards at a Danish Activity Centre as a Culturally Specific Form of Active Ageing

Bibliographic Data

ID3073629
AuthorsAske Juul Lassen (0000-0002-7569-5930, University of Copenhagen, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume44
Issue1
Publication date2014-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnologia Europaea (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0425-4597 • E-ISSN: 1604-3030
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.16995/ee.1121
OpenAlexW3094397685
LanguageEN
Citations received7

Building on an ethnographic study of older men playing billiards at an activity centre as well as document analysis of how the concept of activity has changed during the last sixty years, this article argues that active ageing policies have overlooked that activities are culturally significant forms of practice situated in socio-material collectives. Active ageing policies create a hierarchy amongst activities, wherein constant physical activity is at the core of a healthy old age. But in billiards, activity and passivity are meticulously composed into a rhythm that enables the players to engage for hours and that thus produces a collective practice. The article concludes that activity and passivity are entangled, and a game such as billiards contains qualities that could be translated into a revised active ageing policy

Active ageing · Ageing · Danish · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Ethnography · Healthy ageing · Hierarchy · Linguistics · Older people · Political science · Situated · Sociology · Anthropology · Computer Science · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Gerontology

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access