Introduction

This chapter explores both conceptual and theoretical issues that impinge on understanding aging and anti-aging in modern society. It analyzes how knowledge formation of aging, with particular reference to “anti-aging” in contemporary Western society, is socially constituted and positioned by powerful taken-for- granted assumptions. These assumptions have provided a power/knowledge base for biomedical disciplines. Given this objective, this book explores theoretical issues about the ontological status of knowledge, examining and moving beyond conventional biomedical philosophical dualisms of “aging as decline”/“decline as aging” and anti-aging as its cure. Indeed, Michel Foucault’s notion that we are governed by means of social processes by which we affirm our freedom is highly pertinent. The informed use of “thinking tools” from social theory is part of the epistemic aim to debunk and shatter those taken-for-granted assumptions about constructions of aging, its biomedical contestations, and theoretical relationships of macro/micro, local/global, and object/subject to issues of culture, body, and power/knowledge.