The exploration proposed here is pursued through a complex, regional case study. Regional case studies enable delineating a portion of the world, with a consistent set of institutions and policies as well as geographical and material conditions that set the frame for people’s lives, and to identify the complex dynamics by which sociogenetic, microgenetic and ontogenetic transformation co-occur. This chapter presents how we approached, conceived and analysed this case study. To start with, I define my approach to ageing as a form of personal engagement, which progressively developed into a collaborative project. After showing the relevance of a regional case study for sociocultural psychology of the lifecourse, I present the fieldwork, the data collection, an overview of the participants and the main line of the analysis.

This chapter approaches the concrete, everyday lives of older persons in the Vineyard region. We examine how people living in towns, in villages, alone or in shared housing, organise their lives. Daily trajectories, typical interactions, everyday encounters are described. The chapter first examines informal encounters and networks, daily interactions, occasional meetings, and the importance of social interactions. Both the role of ‘lighthouse watcher’ and tenuous ties are put to the fore. Second, the chapter follows interactions taking place in an institutional setting, a day-care centre. Here also, people can develop meaningful activities and reveal their engagements, while the frame can offer a containing function. Altogether, this chapter shows how evolving material, social and symbolic environments are deeply related to people’s development in older age.

This chapter explores the many ways Mexico became central in Ginsberg’s poetic evolution. Inspired by the example of his mentor, William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg visited several archaeological sites in Mexico such as Palenque, which inspired one of his most successful early poems, “Siesta in Xbalba.” Ginsberg traveled widely throughout the country and continued the mystical quest which began with his experience of “cosmic consciousness” in Harlem in 1948 as he read the poetry of William Blake. In poems such as “Paterson,” Ginsberg wrote that he “would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping/in my veins,/eyes and ears full of marijuana, /eating the god Peyote…” than endure his life in America. Ginsberg read widely in the history of culture of Mexico, and his poems as well as his journals reveal the profound effect Mexico would have on his life and work.

Overshadowed by other international journeys, Ginsberg’s six months traveling alone through South America in 1960 have been relatively neglected by biographers and critics. However, recent editions and new research enable a better understanding of the literary and political significance of his geographic and drug trips in the region. The long-delayed publication of his South American Journals in 2019 reveals how prescient Ginsberg was to see the visionary value of ayahuasca (aka yagé), the indigenous psychedelic, set against the policing of reality by a materialistic world. His journals also show the full extent of his spiritual crisis in South America and his difficulties in finding a poetic form to express his experiences. Although The Yage Letters has been neglected by Ginsberg scholars, the complex backstory of the book of South American trips he coauthored with William S. Burroughs reveals a much greater role in its creation.

Allen Ginsberg read, reread, and approached the work of Walt Whitman throughout his life. How should we understand the overtly acknowledged relationship between these two poets? This chapter suggests that at the same time as one can trace the references Ginsberg makes to Whitman in his poems, compare and contrast the focus of each, or consider the parallels between the poetics of the two, we can also understand (the sometimes unsavory) Whitman in the (sometimes unsavory) Ginsberg canon as a screen onto which Ginsberg projected his ideas of his own literary ethos and significance.

This chapter deals with Allen Ginsberg's enormous personal archive. It includes the history of how the archive was created, what the contents of the archive are, and how it came to be located in the Special Collections Department of Stanford University's library. It details some of the many uses of the archive today and in the future.

This chapter examines Allen Ginsberg’s life-long relationship to education through an exploration of his formative years in both high school and at Columbia University in New York, his founding of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, with Anne Waldman as well as his work teaching at Brooklyn College, and finally the legacy of his writing as it continues to be taught. Ginsberg always had a scholarly disposition, and thus it comes as little surprise that he was an award-winning student in high school. This success continued into his Columbia years, though his education expanded outside the classroom to include a “Beat” underworld that introduced him to illicit substances and clandestine texts. While he left the university to pursue poetry, he reentered it later in life to teach, with Buddhism being a key component of his pedagogy, especially at Naropa. While not everyone was a fan of Ginsberg’s pedagogy, most found his heartfelt attempt to share his own thoughts, feelings, and ideas on his own favorite poets in the classroom to have been enlightening. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the problems and potential Ginsberg still holds as his controversial work enters the classroom today.