Living in different times

Human societies are not static entities that can be studied and analysed outside of time. They can be likened to a train, where at every moment, someone is getting on (newborns and immigrants) while someone else is getting off (the dying and emigrants). How do memory and future interrelate for those who get on and off the train? Where is the train coming from, and where is it headed? Societies must be understood as an entity whose composition is constantly renewing through the succession of generations. What is true of every society is equally, and even more, true of the human population that inhabits the planet like a ship traveling through space.

The concept of generation is widespread. In everyday language, it has a plurality of meanings. It has a bio-anthropological connotation, as ‘generativity’ (indicating the links of the chain connecting parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren), but it also denotes the fact that being born in a certain period and having lived the crucial years of formation in a certain cultural climate shaped by certain historical events leaves a mark on the way individuals feel, think and act. The fact of belonging to a particular ‘time’ unites the members of a generation, distinguishing them from previous and subsequent generations.

Both these common notions do not deviate much from the use of the concept in historical and social sciences, where it is frequently employed in two different realms. First, in a demographic sense, we speck of ‘age cohorts’ to identify the ensemble of those who were born in a particular time period (usually a year). We also refer to ‘age cohorts’ to denote those who enter school or the military (in those countries that still mandate military service), or even new electors crossing the age threshold at which they acquire the right to vote. Second, in a historical/ sociological sense, the word ‘generation’ identifies the ensemble of those who experienced certain events or historical phases at certain stages of their lives.

A society with many elders and few young people

Let us start with the demographic sense involving the distribution of population in age classes, which sets the framework for a few fundamental dynamics in the relationship between generations. We will consider two groups: people aged 0 to 19 (children, teenagers, and youths) and people over 60 years of age.