KEEPING THINGS, BUT ONLY FOR A WHILE
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Issue Date
2019-11-08Author
Ekerdt, David J.
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, author accepted manuscript
Rights
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.
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Show full item recordAbstract
The life course is accomplished by material culture held as a convoy of possessions, but also sustained by public affordances and amenities that include the artifacts and artworks to be found in museums. In both places—household and museum—objects come and go, but there is mainly keeping. The difference lies in the capacity to keep things indefinitely: it is virtue for museums but a predicament for households of aging adults. Museums model ideals of permanence and responsibility toward things, ideals that, in the long run, households can only faintly attain. For older adults and for gerontologists, preservation is the wrong lesson to take away from the galleries. Rather, what we can learn there is how single, selected things can show, in a thoughtful way, an entire world of ideas and universe of meaning. No need to keep it all—and forever—but we can honor things while we can.
Description
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Innovation in Aging following peer review. The version of record Ekerdt D. J. (2019). KEEPING THINGS, BUT ONLY FOR A WHILE. Innovation in Aging, 3(Suppl 1), S362–S363. https://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igz038.1323 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igz038.1323.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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Citation
Ekerdt D. J. (2019). KEEPING THINGS, BUT ONLY FOR A WHILE. Innovation in Aging, 3(Suppl 1), S362–S363. https://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igz038.1323
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