The Chief of Lähiö: Retirement and Ageing States in Helsinki, Finland

Retirement is a transitional process, a period associated with an end to working life when individuals develop new social lives and belonging. Simultaneously, retirement is an institutional moment, involving new obligations and contractual arrangements with the state. The state is an often overlooked but an integral part of the retirement process. Not only can it define at what age retirement can be accessed, but perceptions of the state can transform upon accessing a pension. Building upon six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Helsinki, Finland, this paper follows the case of John, a Sierra Leone national who, despite living in Finland for over forty years, has been denied Finnish citizenship due to his minor debts. Following John’s retirement process, during which he was forced to negotiate for debt relief and faced racism, I demonstrate how the process of retirement not only transformed John’s experience of belonging to his urban locality, but also to the state. In this paper, I argue that the state is constituted by diverse practices and encounters that are framed relationally by temporal dimensions relating to age. Developing the concept of ageing states, I illustrate how one’s position along the life course can be an additional ingredient for understanding the state.