The home over the hill. Towards a modern cosmology of institutionalization

The cosmology of modernity is invoked to comment on the linkage between anthropology and gerontology. Several ethnographic case studies are enlisted to describe the process of constituting the old as the ultimate other through gradual erosion of space, time, and self itself. The cultural image of old age is understood as an inevitable consequence of macrosocial forces manifested in everyday situations, which in turn create a phenomenologically "given" world devoid of socially legitimate subjectivity old age.