When the old person is the Other

How to do research on aging whose agents refer about the old person as the other, even when they occupy exclusive places for the elderly? How to think by the definitions of the native when he doesn’t recognize yourself in the category that is identified? In Brazil, this occurrence is frequent and shows the lines in which are drawn this stage of life and the life course in the national context. 

Old is the other one and is thought together with negative terms relating to personality, as lazy, grumpy, sick, neurotic, sad.

The research is qualitive and discusses about elderly councils in which the most of its members are more than sixty years old, as the Statute of the Elderly – a document on national since 2002 – defines this category. Such members, most of them, are in the council in the senior chair and highlight the work done on behalf of the elderly population. They refer the population that they represent as the bedridden people. The argue is they can not leave their homes to be there. These are called, by elderly members’s council, as poor old people.   

The councils are a space created by the Constitution of 1989 in an effort to implement a democratic State. They are an instance  formed by representatives from government and civil society in order to supervise the actions of the state, to define resolutions and needs of the population. Their existence is regarded as one of the elements that became the State more democratic. 

The research pretends understand the way the aging is defined and what it is though in the public policies in Brazil, also the efforts about how, when and why do they are considered elderly.