A Biocultural Model of Aging (original) (raw)

ANT 761: Biocultural Approaches to Aging Graduate Seminar, Fall 2018 Syllabus

This seminar will focus on human aging in biocultural perspective. We will consider how patterns and processes of human aging compare with those in other animals, particularly nonhuman primates and other hominins. Evolutionary life history theory will be employed to frame adaptive and non-adaptive views of human aging. Cross-cultural patterns in aging will be considered to highlight similarities and differences in the aging process and experience. Discussions will feature topically salient aspects of aging such as sexuality, work, grandparenting, and health. An emphasis is on student critical evaluation of aging research, including methodological approaches one might employ to address some scholarly or applied problem or question concerning human aging.

Ageing: The Common Denominator?

Journal of Population Aging, 2012

This paper undertakes to explore the gerontological and social science literature for the purpose of highlighting that while ageing is a common phenomenon across all world societies it nevertheless remains a unique personal experience. Drawing upon the metaphorical construct of the life journey, the authors use the cultural context of ageing to illustrate how the life-path for each individual, whether long or short, is necessarily unpredictable and involves a dynamic interaction between history and biography within a particular society and cultural framework. The authors challenge prospective readers to use their sociological imagination as proffered by the renowned sociologist C.W. Mills in the interest of moving beyond the biological dimension in order to see more clearly that ‘ageing into old age’ is in essence a unique personal life story. The life story of each individual is seen to represent a compilation of ongoing levels of compliance and /or tension between the individual’s subjective world and external forces the consequence of the individual being a thinking, willing and feeling person, an existential entity with potential for meaning making, self organization and adaptive responses to changing life circumstances. Notwithstanding the diverse cultural, racial and ethnic differences between people worldwide the ageing experience is shown to be a phenomenon displaying cross-cultural variability warranting further ongoing anthropological research. An examination of the many pathways to ageing utilizing a series of interactive factors helps to explain the existence of advantages and disadvantages leading to variations in availability and access to ‘life chances’ resulting in many people experiencing unacceptable levels of ill-health, poverty, racism, ageism, inequality and widespread levels of social injustice and abuse of human rights.

Permanent Personhood or Meaningful Decline? Toward a Critical Anthropology of Successful Aging

The current North American successful aging movement offers a particular normative model of how to age well, one tied to specific notions of individualist personhood especially valued in North America emphasizing independence, productivity, self-maintenance, and the individual self as project. This successful aging paradigm, with its various incarnations as active, healthy and productive aging, has received little scrutiny as to its cultural assumptions. Drawing on fieldwork data with elders from both India and the United States, this article offers an analysis of cultural assumptions underlying the North American successful aging paradigm as represented in prevailing popular and scientific discourse on how to age well. Four key themes in this public successful aging discourse are examined: individual agency and control; maintaining productive activity; the value of independence and importance of avoiding dependence; and permanent personhood, a vision of the ideal person as not really aging at all in late life, but rather maintaining the self of one's earlier years. Although the majority of the (Boston-area, well-educated, financially privileged) US elders making up this study, and some of the most cosmopolitan Indians, embrace and are inspired by the ideals of the successful aging movement, others critique the prevailing successful aging model for insufficiently incorporating attention to and acceptance of the human realities of mortality and decline. Ultimately, the article argues that the vision offered by the dominant successful aging paradigm is not only a particular cultural and biopolitical model but, despite its inspirational elements, in some ways a counterproductive one. Successful aging discourse might do well to come to better terms with conditions of human transience and decline, so that not all situations of dependence, debility and even mortality in late life will be viewed and experienced as "failures" in living well.

A culturally-relevant theoretical framework for the study of successful ageing

Ageing and Society, 1999

In spite of the many studies conducted over the past decades, the field of inquiry known as cross-cultural gerontology remains atheoretical. This is because of its shortcomings in generating culturally-relevant theoretical frameworks of its own. In this article, I address this failure and adapt Kluckhohn's model of value orientations for use in the study of ageing-related concepts. I discuss possible applications of the adapted model and, in particular, its application to one of the most frequently debated concepts in gerontology, successful ageing. In the light of this discussion, I conclude that the culturally-relevant theoretical framework hereby proposed could lead to the rectification of the current atheoretical predicament of cross-cultural gerontology.

The Collective Spirit of Aging Across Cultures

International Perspectives on Aging, 2014

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.

The Challenge of Cultural Gerontology

The Gerontologist, 2014

Over the last decade, Cultural Gerontology has emerged as one of the most vibrant elements of writing about age (Twigg, J., & Martin, W. (Eds.) (2015). The Routledge handbook of cultural gerontology. London: Routledge). Reflecting the wider Cultural Turn, it has expanded the field of gerontology beyond all recognition. No longer confined to frailty, or the dominance of medical and social welfare perspectives, cultural gerontology addresses the nature and experience of later years in the widest sense. In this review, we will explore how the Cultural Turn, which occurred across the social sciences and humanities in the late 20th century, came to influence age studies. We will analyze the impulses that led to the emergence of the field and the forces that have inhibited or delayed its development. We will explore how cultural gerontology has recast aging studies, widening its theoretical and substantive scope, taking it into new territory intellectually and politically, presenting this in terms of 4 broad themes that characterize the work: subjectivity and identity; the body and embodiment; representation and the visual; and time and space. Finally, we will briefly address whether there are problems in the approach.

A review of anthropological approaches to ageing

Anthropological Review, 1997

It is evident that the pattern of ageing among humans has a unique character. Therefore, when undertaking any research on human ageing one has to specify a proper methodology and methods which are available in the anthropological perspective. The paper is aimed at providing a review of anthropological approaches to the study of ageing. On the basis of the meaning and scope of the concept of ageing, its sources and causal factors are discussed. Further, functional, physiological and morphological indicators of ageing are briefly described. Much attention is focused on the concept of biological age which is the key notion for assessment of variation in the rates of human ageing.

Ege University 18th International Cultural Studies Symposium, “Ageing, Surviving and Longevity"

CSS , 2022

Dear Colleagues, We are delighted to invite you to our 18th International Cultural Studies Symposium entitled “Ageing, Surviving and Longevity", scheduled on May 25-27, 2022, at the Faculty of Letters, Ege University, IZMIR, TURKEY. You are welcome to send your proposals by January 10, 2022. For more information, please visit our website: css.ege.edu.tr

Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course

Aging and the Life Course:Global Transformations," Jay Sokolovsky Series Editor, 2013

"“The life course” as the socially and culturally organized progression of individuals through time, has long been an implicit conceptual framework for understanding cultural change. This volume positions the human life course at the center of anthropological inquiry, tracing the complexities of social relationships and cultural identities back to fundamental questions of what it means to grow up and grow older. The contributors represent a range of recent approaches to the study of the life course in anthropology, including new perspectives on changing identities over the lifespan, inter-generational dynamics, the uses of memory and narrative, the experience of body, and the complex relationships between politics, economics, and age. Together, they attempt to capture the diverse ways notions of the life course are constructed and manipulated to create meaning and transform social relationships. Separately, they look at the life course in India, Mexico, Japan, Argentina, the E.U., and other locales, as well as locations across the United States from the factory to the clinic. In ethnographically rich portraits of real people and their daily lives (the victories and the struggles), the contributors examine a wide range of human experience, from sexuality to suffering, labor to spirituality. Across these portraits we see transition and transformation: lives and people changing, and with the passage of time the creation of new obstacles, opportunities, perspectives, vocations, and identities. Contributors include: Mary Catherine Bateson, Lindsey Martin, Emily Wentzell, Jeanne Shea, Jessica Robbins, Frances Norwood, Jane Guyer and Kabiru Salami, Sarah Lamb, Michelle Gamburd, Diana Brown, Marta Rodriguez-Galan, Caitrin Lynch and Jason Danely. Afterword by Jennifer Cole"