Du Toit contributes to the study of the climacteric as an important phase of the life cycle among women of different cultures (the later reproductive and postreproductive years). Drawing upon perspectives in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and gerontology, he demonstrates the need for an adequate cross-cultural theory of aging among women, and offers a solid body of research from South Africa in establishing a standard methodology for the study of the climacteric.
Guide with more than two thousand bibliographic entries and cross-references. It includes journal articles, book chapters, essays, and doctoral dissertations, as well as complete books.
Medical practitioners and the ordinary citizen are becoming more aware that we need to understand cultural variation in medical belief and practice. The more we know how health and disease are managed in different cultures, the more we can recognize what is "culture bound" in our own medical belief and practice. The Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology is unique because it is the first reference work to describe the cultural practices relevant to health in the world's cultures and to provide an overview of important topics in medical anthropology. No other single reference work comes close to marching the depth and breadth of information on the varying cultural background of health and illness around the world. More than 100 experts - anthropologists and other social scientists - have contributed their firsthand experience of medical cultures from around the world.
Du Toit examines the results of two surveys which he made a decade apart among high school students of Black, Indian, White, and Colored backgrounds. The initial survey showed some acceptance of the use of these substances among a small proportion of high school students but a high degree of intolerance of such use by the majority. Over a ten-year period, the attitudes of the different population groups changed somewhat. The decade represented in this study saw major changes in social and political conditions in South Africa. These changes tended to reduce the significance of cultural factors influencing cannabis use among members of the black population.
This handbook is organised into four sections on theory and methods, aging and the social structure, social factors and social institutions and aging and social intervention.
During the 1970s, Comparative Cultural Gerontology or the Anthropology of Aging, with its focus on aging from a cross-cultural perspective, attained the status of a new speciality in the field of anthropology. It was only in the late 1960s to the mid-70s that elderly people and the process of aging became recognized as a bona fide research topic for anthropology. Majorie M. Schweitzer's Anthropology of Aging looks at aging from this cross-cultural perspective and updates the Association for Anthropology and Gerontology's previously published Topical Bibliography and the Supplement to the Topical Bibliography on the Anthropology of Aging. Schweitzer focuses on citations that represent anthropological perspectives and/or cross-cultural data, with data from other disciplines included when warranted. Besides a greatly expanded number of bibliographical references, Schweitzer's work includes annotations for particularly important citations including those that address special issues, such as method and theory as they relate to aging, and those that provide the clearest treatment of a particular topic. The topical outline of the 1982 volume has been retained with only minor additions and changes making the Bibliography both easy to use and a rich resource for researchers. Over 40 international scholars in the field of aging have updated the various sections of the original bibliography. Organized according to two kinds of topics: subject topics, such as Modernization; and regional/cultural group topics, such as Great Britain/American Indian, the reference contains 14 chapters that investigate research on the subject from Africa to the Pacific Rim, USSR, USA, Europe, Israel, and more. Beginning with a chapter that zeroes in on general, theoretical, and comparative works, the volume procedes with chapters that examine demography, biology, and longevity, medical aspects of aging, non-industrialized societies, national cultures, modernization, and ethnic/rural segments of the United States. The last six chapters examine social structure; community organization, and age-homogeneous residences; urban aged, social networks, support systems; women; death and dying; and methods. The final chapter contains a list of additional bibliographies. A must for most research libraries, this comprehensive bibliography will be widely used by teachers, students, researchers, social workers, service providers and administrators from many different disciplines.
