Main description:

Rapid population aging, once associated with only a select group of modern industrialized nations, has now become a topic of increasing global concern. This volume reframes aging on a global scale by illustrating the multiple ways it is embedded within individual, social, and cultural life courses. It presents a broad range of ethnographic work, introducing a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to studying life-course transitions in conjunction with broader sociocultural transformations. Through detailed accounts, in such diverse settings as nursing homes in Sri Lanka, a factory in Massachusetts, cemeteries in Japan and clinics in Mexico, the authors explore not simply our understandings of growing older, but the interweaving of individual maturity and intergenerational relationships, social and economic institutions, and intimate experiences of gender, identity, and the body.

Contents:

PART I: FRAMEWORKS

Introduction: Transitions and Transformations: Paradigms, Perspectives, and Possibilities

Jason Danely and Caitrin Lynch

Chapter 1. Changes in the Life Course: Strengths and Stages

Mary Catherine Bateson

PART II: BODIES

Chapter 2. Narrating Pain and Seeking Continuity: A Life-Course Approach to Chronic Pain Management

Lindsey Martin

Chapter 3. Venting Anger From the Body During Gengnianqi: Meanings of Midlife Transition Among Chinese Women in Reform-Era Beijing

Jeanne L. Shea

Chapter 4. "I Don't Want to Be Like My Father:" Masculinity, Modernity, and Intergenerational Relationships in Mexico

Emily Wentzell

PART III: SPATIALITY AND TEMPORALITY

Chapter 5. Shifting Moral Ideals of Aging in Poland: Suffering, Self-Actualization, and the Nation

Jessica C. Robbins

Chapter 6. A Window into Death: Euthanasia and End-of-Life in the Public-Private Space of the Dutch Home

Frances Norwood

Chapter 7. Temporality, Spirituality, and the Life Course in an Aging Japan

Jason Danely

PART IV: FAMILIES

Chapter 8. "I Have to Stay Healthy:" Elder Caregiving and the Third Age in a Brazilian Community

Diana De G. Brown

Chapter 9. Grandmothering in Life-Course Perspective: A Study of Puerto Rican Grandmothers Raising Grandchildren in the United States

Marta B. Rodriguez-Galan

Chapter 10. Care Work and Property Transfers: Intergenerational Family Obligations in Sri Lanka

Michele Ruth Gamburd

PART V: ECONOMIES

Chapter 11. Personhood, Appropriate Dependence, and the Rise of Eldercare Institutions in India

Sarah Lamb

Chapter 12. Membership and Mattering: Agency and Work in a New England Factory

Caitrin Lynch

Chapter 13. Life Courses of Indebtedness in Rural Nigeria

Jane I. Guyer and Kabiru K. Salami

Afterword: On Generations and Aging: "Fresh Contact" of a Different Sort

Jennifer Cole

Contributors' Bios

Bibliography