Towards a Medical Anthropology of Ageing
Towards a Medical Anthropology of Ageing

Author: Miguel Kottow

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-10-19

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1527520005

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The proportion of people over 65 is substantially increasing and will continue to do so in the coming decades. Societies are concerned about the depletion of pension funds and austere fiscal plans that are unable to subsidize the basic care, protection and needs of their growing elderly populations. Gerontology is rapidly becoming a burgeoning research discipline that studies multiple aspects of human ageing, leading to top-down social policies that ineffectually address the significant needs of aged persons. Geriatric medicine has also expanded, attempting to medicalize the ageing process into a disease-free stage of “healthy ageing.” Ageing itself, this book argues, however, is not a disease per se, and should not be medicalized. In an era of uncertain medical expectations and unfulfilled social care of the ageing, this book presents an anthropological view, that focuses on three essential and transcendental conditions of human life that become vulnerable with advancing age: namely, relating to others, being in the world, and leaving a mark or legacy in the world.

Through Japanese Eyes
Through Japanese Eyes

Author: Yohko Tsuji

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2020-11-13

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1978819579

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In Through Japanese Eyes, based on her thirty-year research at a senior center in upstate New York, anthropologist Yohko Tsuji describes old age in America from a cross-cultural perspective. Comparing aging in America and in her native Japan, she discovers that notable differences in the panhuman experience of aging are rooted in cultural differences between these two countries, and that Americans have strongly negative attitudes toward aging because it represents the antithesis of cherished American values, especially independence. Tsuji reveals that American culture, despite its seeming lack of guidance for those aging, plays a pivotal role in elders’ lives, simultaneously assisting and constraining them. Furthermore, the author’s lengthy period of research illustrates major changes in her interlocutors’ lives, incorporating their declines and death, and significant shifts in the culture of aging in American society as Tsuji herself gets to know American culture and grows into senescence herself. Through Japanese Eyes offers an ethnography of aging in America from a cross-cultural perspective based on a lengthy period of research. It illustrates how older Americans cope with the gap between the ideal (e.g., independence) and the real (e.g., needing assistance) of growing older, and the changes the author observed over thirty years of research.

Transitions and Transformations
Transitions and Transformations

Author: Caitrin Lynch

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2013-04-01

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0857457799

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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.

Elderhood
Elderhood

Author: Louise Aronson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-06-11

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 1620405482

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Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction A New York Times Bestseller Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Winner of the WSU AOS Bonner Book Award Winner of the 2022 At Home With Growing Older Impact Award As revelatory as Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson's Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. For more than 5,000 years, "old" has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we've made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied. Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age that's neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy--a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself. Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author's own words, "an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being."

Inequalities of Aging
Inequalities of Aging

Author: Elana D. Buch

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2018-08-28

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1479807176

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"Elana D. Buch's "Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care" focuses on the topic of American home care and explores various contradictions and points of tension within the industry. It also raises awareness of the problematic inequality that exists in the American home care industry and argues for the creation of a more sustainable system."--

Growing Old in a New China
Growing Old in a New China

Author: Rose K. Keimig

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2021-02-12

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1978813937

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Growing Old in a New China: Transitions in Elder Care is an accessible exploration of changing care arrangements in China. Combining anthropological theory, ethnographic vignettes, and cultural and social history, it sheds light on the growing movement from home-based to institutional elder care in urban China. The book examines how tensions between old and new ideas, desires, and social structures are reshaping the experience of caring and being cared for. Weaving together discussions of family ethics, care work, bioethics, aging, and quality of life, this book puts older adults at the center of the story. It explores changing relationships between elders and themselves, their family members, caregivers, society, and the state, and the attempts made within and across these relational webs to find balance and harmony. The book invites readers to ponder the deep implications of how and why we care and the ways end-of-life care arrangements complicate both living and dying for many elders.

Aging and Human Nature
Aging and Human Nature

Author: Mark Schweda

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-01-11

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 3030250970

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This book focuses on ageing as a topic of philosophical, theological, and historical anthropology. It provides a systematic inventory of fundamental theoretical questions and assumptions involved in the discussion of ageing and old age. What does it mean for human beings to grow old and become more vulnerable and dependent? How can we understand the manifestations of ageing and old age in the human body? How should we interpret the processes of change in the temporal course of a human life? What impact does old age have on the social dimensions of human existence? In order to tackle these questions, the volume brings together internationally distinguished scholars from the fields of philosophy, theology, cultural studies, social gerontology, and ageing studies. The collection of their original articles makes a twofold contribution to contemporary academic discourse. On one hand, it helps to clarify and deepen our understanding of ageing and old age by examining it from the fundamental point of view of philosophical, theological, and historical anthropology. At the same time, it also enhances and expands the discourses of philosophical, theological, and historical anthropology by systematically taking into account that human beings are essentially ageing creatures.

No Aging in India
No Aging in India

Author: Lawrence Cohen

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1998-07-30

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780520925328

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From the opening sequence, in which mid-nineteenth-century Indian fishermen hear the possibility of redemption in an old woman's madness, No Aging in India captures the reader with its interplay of story and analysis. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic work, Lawrence Cohen links a detailed investigation of mind and body in old age in four neighborhoods of the Indian city of Varanasi (Banaras) with events and processes around India and around the world. This compelling exploration of senility—encompassing not only the aging body but also larger cultural anxieties—combines insights from medical anthropology, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. Bridging literary genres as well as geographic spaces, Cohen responds to what he sees as the impoverishment of both North American and Indian gerontologies—the one mired in ambivalence toward demented old bodies, the other insistent on a dubious morality tale of modern families breaking up and abandoning their elderly. He shifts our attention irresistibly toward how old age comes to matter in the constitution of societies and their narratives of identity and history.

Rituals of Care
Rituals of Care

Author: Felicity Aulino

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1501739751

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Aulino's work is a strong contribution to the study of aging in the field of medical anthropology specifically because of the focus on the embodied performativity of care evident in her research practice and analysis. Rituals of Care is an excellent book, which offers a thoughtful approach to everyday care in Thailand. ― Anthropology & Aging End-of-life issues are increasingly central to discussions within medical anthropology, the anthropology of political action, and the study of Buddhist philosophy and practice. Felicity Aulino's Rituals of Care speaks directly to these important anthropological and existential conversations. Against the backdrop of global population aging and increased attention to care for the elderly, both personal and professional, Aulino challenges common presumptions about the universal nature of "caring." The way she examines particular sets of emotional and practical ways of being with people, and their specific historical lineages, allows Aulino to show an inseparable link between forms of social organization and forms of care. Unlike most accounts of the quotidian concerns of providing care in a rapidly aging society, Rituals of Care brings attention to corporeal processes. Moving from vivid descriptions of the embodied routines at the heart of home caregiving to depictions of care practices in more general ways—care for one's group, care of the polity—it develops the argument that religious, social, and political structures are embodied, through habituated action, in practices of providing for others. Under the watchful treatment of Aulino, care becomes a powerful foil for understanding recent political turmoil and structural change in Thailand, proving embodied practice to be a vital vantage point for phenomenological and political analyses alike.

The New American Servitude
The New American Servitude

Author: Cati Coe

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2019-04-02

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1479808830

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Finalist, 2020 Elliott P. Skinner Award, given by the Association of Africanist Anthropology Examines why African care workers feel politically excluded from the United States Care for America’s growing elderly population is increasingly provided by migrants, and the demand for health care labor is only expected to grow. Because of this health care crunch and the low barriers to entry, new African immigrants have adopted elder care as a niche employment sector, funneling their friends and relatives into this occupation. However, elder care puts care workers into racialized, gendered, and age hierarchies, making it difficult for them to achieve social and economic mobility. In The New American Servitude, Coe demonstrates how these workers often struggle to find a sense of political and social belonging. They are regularly subjected to racial insults and demonstrations of power—and effectively turned into servants—at the hands of other members of the care worker network, including clients and their relatives, agency staff, and even other care workers. Low pay, a lack of benefits, and a lack of stable employment, combined with a lack of appreciation for their efforts, often alienate them, so that many come to believe that they cannot lead valuable lives in the United States. While jobs are a means of acculturating new immigrants, African care workers don’t tend to become involved or politically active. Many plan to leave rather than putting down roots in the US. Offering revealing insights into the dark side of a burgeoning economy, The New American Servitude carries serious implications for the future of labor and justice in the care work industry.