Other Ways of Growing Old
Anthropological Perspectives
Stevan Harrell editor Pamela T Amoss editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Stanford University Press
Published:1st Mar '81
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£116.00(9780804710725)
As anthropologists, we offer this book about aging in a wide variety of human societies in the hope of its making three contributions. First, this book will help to remedy a massive neglect of old age by the discipline of anthropology. The pioneering work of Leo Simmons (1945) has remained a lonely monument since the 1940's, for despite recent interest in the subject of aging in modern Western societies on the part of social gerontologists and sociologists, little has been done by anthropologists on aging in non-Western societies. Where it has been treated at all, it has been in the form either of a few final paragraphs in the discussion of the life cycle or of a simple ethnographic fact among other facts about a certain social system. What has been missing has been any attempt to put aging in a cross-cultural or comparative perspective, to give this vital subject the same treatment that has been accorded marriage, for example, or death or inheritance or sex roles.
Second, this book will bring a needed cross-cultural perspective to the study of social gerontology. The recent explosion of interest in this field has been largely confined to the study of aging in North America and Europe. But we anthropologists feel that such a culturally limited study, though interesting and productive in its own right, is dangerously narrow if it does not consider what aging is like in other societies. What aspects of aging, for example, are human universals and have to be planned for as inevitable, and what aspects are cultural particulars and can be avoided, modified, or strengthened under certain social conditions? By presenting both a biological account of the universals of human aging (Weiss), and specific ethnographic accounts of aging in a wide variety of societies, we believe we can help to put North American aging into perspective
Third, we hope this book will serve as an illustration of a particular anthropological approach to unity and diversity in human societies and cultures. Perhaps the main task of sociocultural anthropology is a twofold one: the explanation of cross-cultural universals, somehow rooted either in the biological nature of the human species or in universal imperatives of social organization, and the explanation of intercultural variations, rooted in a...
'These perspectives on aging include a chapter from physical anthropology, one from primatology, and social structural studies from mile different cultures ... in the Kalahari Desert, northern Canada, Zambia, Micronesia, New Guinea, Afghanistan, Taiwan, South India, and North America's northwest coast. These studies are well-balanced in quality and coverage with respect to the organizational themes, and the authors' various styles of presentation keep the reading lively. It is an interesting book and should be useful as a text.' Science Books and Films (A.A.A.S.)
ISBN: 9780804711531
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
296 pages