A positive discourse about ‘healthy aging’ and ‘active aging’ shapes many health policies targeting the elderly. Rather than portraying old age as a life stage of passivity and decline, this discourse transforms late life into a period of physical activity and fulfilling social involvement – especially in terms of engagement with one’s family, friends, and ‘community’.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Danish municipality, the chapter examines how health-promotion activities targeted at the elderly function in practice, and discusses the various forms of ‘community’ that the municipality strives to cultivate among its older citizens. It also explores how certain positive paradigms of ‘healthy aging’ and ‘the good life’ have been constructed, and how they may be reproduced and reinforced within Danish public-health policies.
By analysing the actors, practices, and interactions that may constitute different collectives within the politically delineated geographic borders of the municipality, the chapter describes some of the social, cultural, and political practices that connect various forms of ‘community’, and how these practices may affect (and be affected by) elderly citizens’ civic engagement and continued participation in society.