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Observing that people change both physically and cognitively as they age, Posner suggests that each of us has, in succession, two separate selves - younger and older - with different abilities, interests, and behaviors, an insight that helps clarify a number of issues concerning the elderly.
People are living longer, creating an unexpected boom in the elderly population. Longevity is increasing not only in wealthy countries but in developing nations as well. In response, many policy makers and scholars are preparing for a global crisis of aging. But for too long, Western experts have conceived of aging as a universal predicament—one that supposedly provokes the same welfare concerns in every context. In the twenty-first century, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan writes, we must embrace a new approach to the problem, one that prioritizes local agendas and values. As the World Ages is a history of how gerontologists, doctors, social scientists, and activists came to define the issue of global aging. Sivaramakrishnan shows that transnational organizations like the United Nations, private NGOs, and philanthropic foundations embraced programs that reflected prevailing Western ideas about development and modernization. The dominant paradigm often assumed that, because large-scale growth of an aging population happened first in the West, developing societies will experience the issues of aging in the same ways and on the same terms as their Western counterparts. But regional experts are beginning to question this one-size-fits-all model and have chosen instead to recast Western expertise in response to provincial conditions. Focusing on South Asia and Africa, Sivaramakrishnan shows how regional voices have argued for an approach that responds to local needs and concerns. The research presented in As the World Ages will help scholars, policy makers, and advocates appreciate the challenges of this recent shift in global demographics and find solutions sensitive to real life in diverse communities.
Aging is a universal experience, and an individual one. But it is also a cultural phenomenon. Our ethnic and social background has a strong influence on how we deal with growing old. This collection draws on research from around the world to explore how cultural context shapes and defines the aging process. Studies examine differing patterns in the lives of the aged in Portugal, Polynesia, Sweden, and Israel, and among ethnic groups in the United States.
This book introduces undergraduates to library research in the field of gerontology and focuses on the wide variety of sources available for research. It covers physiological and psychological aspects of aging; social aspects of aging; and environmental aspects of aging.
Cross-Cultural Studies of Biological Aging reviews papers that tackle issues of biological aging from a cross-cultural perspective. The studies emphasize the interaction of biological, cultural, and environmental factors that provides the data about the range of variation in certain biological process. The book is comprised of 12 chapters that cover various concerns about the aging process from a cross-cultural perspective. Chapter 1 discusses the biological function, activity, and dependency among elderly Sherpa in the Nepal Himalayas, while Chapter 2 deals with work, aging, and dependency in a Sherpa population in Nepal. The third chapter tackles the population genetic models in the study of aging and longevity in a Mennonite community, and the fourth chapter talks about the secular changes in age-specific cause of death in Sanday, Orkney Islands. Chapter 5 covers the developmental and genetic responses to differential childhood mortality, while Chapter 6 discusses how mortality is related to cardiovascular disease and diabetes mellitus in a modernizing population. The seventh chapter tackles the biocultural risks in longevity of Samoans in California. Chapter 8 discusses the changes with age of anatomical distribution of fat, while Chapter 9 provides a comparison of visually estimated age with physiological predicted age as indicators of rates of aging. Chapter 10 reviews a longitudinal study about the patterns of adult weight and fat changes in six Solomon Islands societies, and Chapter 11 discusses aging in selected anthropometric dimensions in a rural Zapotec-speaking community in the valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. The last chapter compares blood pressure at rest and during exercise among Sherpas and Tibetan migrants in Nepal. The text will be of great interest to researchers whose work involves understanding other factors that have causal relationship with biological aging.
Pivoting on Daniel Callahan's proposal to withhold publicly funded life-prolonging medical care from the very old in his 1989 Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society, 14 essays consider the health-care crisis looming early in the next century as the baby boomers reach retirement age. They discuss the role of the aged in society, what the old and young deserve of each other, the source of medical cost increases, implications of rationing according to age, and proposals for a system that will address both immediate problems and long-term conditions. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
From the laughing clubs of India and robotic granny minders of Japan to the "Flexsecurity" system of Denmark and the elderscapes of Florida, experts in this collection bring readers cutting-edge and future-focused approaches to our aging population worldwide. In this fourth edition of an award-winning text on the consequences of global aging, a team of expert anthropologists and other social scientists presents the issues and possible solutions as our population over age 60 rises to double that of the year 2000. Chapters describe how the consequences of global aging will influence life in the 21st century in relation to biological limits on the human life span, cultural construction of the life cycle, generational exchange and kinship, makeup of households and community, and attitudes toward disability and death. This completely revised edition includes 20 new chapters covering China, Japan, Denmark, India, West and East Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, indigenous Amazonia, rural Italy, and the ethnic landscape of the United States. A popular feature is an integrated set of web book chapters listed in the contents, discussed in chapter introductions, and available on the book's web site.