Paper short abstract:

Garrulousness, usually involving repetition, is one of the commonest phenomena of subclinical aging. Natural scientists and the caring professions have noted this phenomenon but do not explain these usually connected traits beyond the marginalisation of the elderly in Western societies. This paper suggests a less circumstantial approach from an evolutionary and comparative-ethnographic perspective.

Paper long abstract:

As populations in the developed West and East age, gerontology becomes more relevant as a focus for scientific and social scientific research. Anthropologists in any of our four fields have generally shown little interest in the elderly in any of the kinds of society they have studied, whether contemporary or pre-historic. This paper harnesses the power of evolutionary explanation and comparative ethnography to explain the prevalence of garrulousness, involving repetition, in the utterances of the elderly.

While there may be many cases of quiet and even catatonic elderly people, the majority seem to become more garrulous in old age, keen to reminisce and telling the same stories over and over again. Isolation of the elderly in nursing homes may explain the garrulousness of Western elders, but this does not obtain where they are part of the family, nor does it explain the element of repetition.

The contention of this paper is that the two traits are linked and are as genetically programmed as the tendency towards longevity in the species. All three have been highly adaptive in the case of a species that for tens if not hundreds of millennium depended on its unique socio-cultural mode of adaptation yet was also not immune to natural selection. In static or only slowly changing societies, in which the generations overlapped, those who obtained and remembered still useful information from the elders had a survival advantage over those who did not. Only under conditions of rapid technological change is it irrelevant and irritating.