Andrew Blaikie – författare

This collection offers a uniquely comprehensive guide to the sociology of the body. With a strong historical scope and conceptual framework, it provides an indispensable reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and a robust source for scholars working in the area. The central focus is on understanding sociology through the body; what is often described as re-reading sociology in a 'more corporeal light'. This is an interdisciplinary process, drawing on history, feminism, cultural history, art history, anthropology, social psychology, philosophy, medical sociology and media and communications, as well as sociology. While this has been primarily a Western practice, The Body seeks to broaden the perspective to include references that draw on alternative cultural assumptions, beliefs and practices (including Japan, and South America.)

As the 'grey market' perpetuates the quest for eternal youth, the biological realities of deep old age are increasingly denied. Ageing and Popular Culture traces the historical emergence of stereotypes of retirement and documents their recent demise, arguing that although modernisation, marginalisation, and medicalisation created rigid age classifications, the rise of consumer culture has coincided with a postmodern broadening of options for those in the Third Age. With an adroit use of photographs and other visual sources, Andrew Blaikie demonstrates that an expanded leisure phase is breaking down barriers between mid and later life. At the same time, 'positive ageing' also creates new imperatives and new norms with attendant forms of deviance. While babyboomers may anticipate a fulfilling retirement, none relish decline. Has deep old age replaced death as the taboo subject of the late twentieth century? If so, what might be the consequences?

As the 'grey market' perpetuates the quest for eternal youth, the biological realities of deep old age are increasingly denied. Ageing and Popular Culture traces the historical emergence of stereotypes of retirement and documents their recent demise, arguing that although modernisation, marginalisation, and medicalisation created rigid age classifications, the rise of consumer culture has coincided with a postmodern broadening of options for those in the Third Age. With an adroit use of photographs and other visual sources, Andrew Blaikie demonstrates that an expanded leisure phase is breaking down barriers between mid and later life. At the same time, 'positive ageing' also creates new imperatives and new norms with attendant forms of deviance. While babyboomers may anticipate a fulfilling retirement, none relish decline. Has deep old age replaced death as the taboo subject of the late twentieth century? If so, what might be the consequences?

This highly original study explores how different, but connected ways of seeing infuse relationships between place and belonging. Its argument is that all memories, whether fleeting glimpses or elaborated narratives, necessarily invoke imagined pasts - tenement life, island cultures, vanished moralities, even the origins of social science. But do these multiple recollections share a common frame of reference? Are perceptions conditioned by a collective social imaginary?Visions of nation and community, from Adam Ferguson’s ideas on the development of civil society through John Grierson’s pioneering of documentary film to the structures of feeling in popular fiction, reflect the impact of modernity on Scottish culture since the late eighteenth century. While landscape as the symbolic ‘face of Scotland’ and its attendant mental contours have been produced and debated in many genres, including travel literature, social commentary, novels and magazines, changes in the means of capturing and presenting images, particularly the emergent possibilities of the photograph, have affected the ways we identify and remember. The analysis adopts a broadly sociological approach, but its range lends equal appeal to social historians, cultural geographers, and particularly those pursuing visual or memory studies.

Andrew Blaikie explores how different, but connected, ways of seeing infuse relationships between place and belonging. He argues that all memories, whether fleeting glimpses or elaborate narratives, invoke imagined pasts – be these of tenement life, island cultures, vanished moralities, even the origins of social science. But do these recollections share a common frame of reference? Are our perceptions conditioned by a collective social imaginary?We see the impact of modernity on Scottish culture in visions of nation and community from the late eighteenth century on, from Adam Ferguson’s ideas on civil society through John Grierson’s pioneering of documentary film to structures of feeling in popular fiction. Landscape as the symbolic ‘face of Scotland’, with its attendant mental contours have been produced and debated in genres including travel literature, social commentary, novels and magazines, but it is the changes in how we capture and present images, particularly given recent technological changes in photography, which have affected the ways we identify and remember.Broadly sociological in approach, the range of Blaikie’s analysis lends itself equally to those interested in social history, cultural geography and visual or memory studies.Key FeaturesAnalyses relationships between memory and local and national identitiesProvides interpretive connections between sociology, history, cultural geography and visual studiesContains 25 black and white illustrations and numerous case studies