Haim Hazan

Haim Hazan (Hebrew: חיים חזן; born 1947) is a professor of sociology and social anthropology at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

He uses ethnographies to show how, regardless of the cultural "iron cage", the elderly manage to build their own existential enclaves as an alternative to a hostile, alienating society.

Based on a research of Jews living in an impoverished district of London in their old age, the book is about the experience and conception of time among the elderly.

Through general reciprocal interactions, a joint bank of sorts where everyone gives what they can and withdraws according to their needs, the give-and-take relations are canceled out along with the conception of past and present.

[citation needed] This book was published in 1990,[8] investigating Project Renewal and offering a critical analysis of the rhetorical, social, institutional and local usages of the term 'community', which prevent investment in vital channels such as employment and education.

He showed that despite the significant difference between them, the subjects devoted effort and imagination to forming a social space that denies the inevitable, stabilizes the present and allows the survival of meaning under conditions of constant existential threat.

[citation needed] This is a theoretical book, published by Cambridge University Press in 1994, where Hazan defined and summarized his findings from his various field researches.

The problems with representation of time, space and meaning, caused by the gap between the two, are used as keys for the existing discourse between old people, without presuming to break into the uniqueness of the experience of aging.

[citation needed] This book, published in 1996, is the product of the ethnographic field research Hazan conducted with 500 elderly people in Cambridge, England, who were part of the University of the Third Age.

They created shared myths of perennial, eternal now, through a discourse which was comprehensible only to them, thus developing a different, adaptive language of temporary, utilitarian relationships necessary for survival.

[citation needed] This book, published in 2001, is about the communicative world of Israeli teenagers: their myths, cultural imagery and the temporal orientations.

[11] The main conclusion in the book is that the processes of globalization – with its post-modern characteristics – which lead Israeli society, actually intensify the local components of national identity.

[13] The basic assumption of this critical approach is the distinction between the cultural constitution of old age and the elderly as human beings, and between what is considered pathological to what is perceived as normal.

In a series of chapters, Hazan tracks down the process through which the key intellectual debates that form the anthropological discourse are developed and oscillate.

[citation needed] This book, coauthored by Dr. Daniel Monterescu and published in 2011, is about the connection between nationalism and the stories of Arab and Jewish elderly, a product of an ethnographic research conducted in Jaffa.

Aging bodies are manipulated through anti-aging techniques until it is no longer possible to do it anymore, at which point they become un-transformable and non-marketable objects and hence commercially and socially invisible or masked.

On the face of it, these examples may seem to have nothing in common, but they all exemplify the same cultural logic of the non-hybrid and provoke similar reactions of criticism, terror, abhorrence, and moral indignation.