Life Cycle - Elders/Old Age - Social Theories Of Aging, Aging As Stigma, Critical And Constructionist Perspectives On Aging, Geroanthropology: A Cross-cultural And Holistic Inquiry
human societies experience expectancy
The study of the human life cycle is primarily a study of the aging process. The question of why humans age has long intrigued social and biological scientists. While a fountain of youth has yet to be discovered, public health and hygiene interventions have lengthened the human life expectancy greatly over the course of the past hundred years. And yet life expectancy varies greatly within and between societies, relating to their relative socioeconomic status, gender, reproductive history, and environment, among other factors. Biologists have estimated the human life span to be approximately 120 years; however, there are no well-documented lives of this length. This discrepancy between life expectancy and life span raises the important and complex relationship between biological and cultural determinants of aging. In effect, an understanding of the life cycle and human aging is predicated upon exploring these determinants of physical, cognitive, and social decline in later life.
All societies possess some mechanism by which to denote or mark stages in the life cycle—in particular, the transition from youth to adult and from adult to elder. Anthropologists have enumerated many formal age classification systems. Age classification systems such as age sets—groups of persons born within a set number of years and considered to be the same age—are more rigid and formalized among horticulturist and pastoralist societies; industrialized societies tend to have less formalized mechanisms to denote elder status and often rely upon physical and chronological markers of aging. Gerontologists also conceptualize age in terms of age grades, cohorts, and social age. Age grades are status differences predicated on culturally defined social ages. Cohorts are generations of people who experience similar historically defining moments that shape their experience. Social age is a way of grouping elders based on particular cultural experience, such as retirement, widowhood, or grandparenthood.
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Leo Simmons's is the first major work to explore the relationship between culture and the experience of old age. Using existing ethnographic works, Simmons evaluated the effects of selected societal traits on the social roles, treatment, and status of the aged across seventy-one globally distributed tribal groups. This work set the stage for further investigation into the sources of cross-c…
While the status of older adults varies cross-culturally, in the United States and other industrialized nations, elders are ascribed low status. This low status may be attributed to the cultural associations of elders with disease, disability, death, and dying. In the United States, the emphasis on independence, autonomy, and bodily integrity casts persons who deviate from the norm as morally and …
The work that Estes began with The Aging Enterprise experienced a resurgence of activity in the later 1990s and the early
twenty-first century. Critical gerontology aims to examine the sociopolitical processes and policies that conspire to disadvantage certain classes of people disproportionately. As a group, elders are often economically and socially disadvantaged, but critical theorists deepen …
Jennie Keith characterizes geroanthropology as a tripartite endeavor consisting of the anthropology of old age, old age within anthropology, and the anthropology of age. Early and contemporary ethnographic works that did not focus on the experience of elders but rather referred to the knowledge and wisdom of elders as repositories and keepers of cultural traditions comprise "old age in anth…
Amoss, Pamela T., and Stevan Harrell, eds. Other Ways of Growing Old: Anthropological Perspectives. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1981. Bengston, Vern L., and K. Warner Schaie, eds. Handbook of Theories of Aging. New York: Springer, 1999. Browne, Colette V. Women, Feminism, and Aging. New York: Springer, 1998. Cohen, Lawrence. "Old Age: Cultural and Critical Perspectives.�…
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User Comments
3 months ago
Studying about old age is very crucial