Life Cycle

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 anthropology." The anthropology of old age is represented by texts that seek to explore the experience of older adults across cultural or national boundaries. Works by Jay Sokolovsky and Margaret Lock represent just a few of the recent texts in this genre. The anthropology of age seeks to understand aging as a social and biological process and does not focus entirely on the end product of aging per se but looks to elders as active participants and creators of the meaning and experience of later life. All three of these endeavors have been dramatically influenced by three widespread processes: the demographic transition, globalization, and the medicalization of aging.

The world's population is aging, but demographic profiles differ widely among nations. The populations of the United States, Canada, and Western Europe are widely known to be "graying," yet the proportions of the populations that are grandparents in nations such as China, Kenya, or Mexico pose entirely different social and economic questions. Industrialized nations view their "aging problem" to be primarily one of social services, health care, and cost containment, whereas nations within sub-Saharan Africa struggle with ways to support elders who are caring for orphans of the HIV pandemic. China, the nation with the largest population in the world, will be facing a caregiver shortage of huge proportions due to shrinking family size and because its elders are concentrated in rural areas with fewer young adults to provide, informally or formally, caregiving support. The demographic transition is often thought to be of concern only to industrialized nations that have the longest life expectancies; however, elders in many nations are suffering the effect of low status and lack of support.

Globalization is often bandied about as a ubiquitous covering term referring to the confluence of goods, labor, and information traveling across national borders, but it is not often considered particularly germane to gerontological research. In fact, however, increased economic globalization since the mid-1980s has had an enormous impact on the status and quality of life of the world's elders. Among other things, globalization has decreased job security, decreased employment-related health and retirement benefits, increased the seasonal migration of low-paid workers, upset local economies, and increased international disease transmission. These changes have forced low-income workers to remain in the workforce longer in order to provide economic support for their households, have raided the retirement funds of those middle-income families who had planned for retirement, and have often increased the cost of prescription drugs and other health care products vital to elders. Globalization is often conceived as an economic boon to national economies and a harbinger of prosperity, but it has also worked to exacerbate the existing systems of relative disadvantage for elders.

Estes was one of the first scholars to point out the trend toward the medicalization of aging. Medicalization, broadly defined, is the transformation of behaviors, bodily states, or bodily functions from a state of naturalness or idiosyncratic or cultural behavior to disease states that can be defined, diagnosed, and perhaps treated. It has been characterized as a form of social control and a tool for the expansion of cultural hegemony. Medicalization affects health insurance policies, the quality of life of those living or working in long-term care facilities, the economic security of unpaid caregivers, notions of self and identity, and access to choice of healing modality. It is an interactional process that occurs between social structures, patients, health care providers, or medical technologies. However, medicalization is steeped in the legitimacy and authority accorded biomedicine. The authority and dominance of the biomedical model in the United States limits the range of appropriate responses to disease. Once medicalized, a disease is appropriately treated as a medical, physical (or psychiatric) problem. Further, medicalization does not necessarily imply an opportunity for efficacious treatment or health improvement. Alzheimer's disease, for example, could be considered a newly medicalized interpretation of senility in older adults. Those who are diagnosed with Alzheimer's are given the stigma and gravity of the diagnosis but are then offered limited care-giver support, pharmacological treatment, or long-term care assistance.

Geroanthropology has been profoundly changed by demographic transition, globalization, and medicalization. The demographic transition forces gerontologists to examine elders' status and quality of life cross-culturally while questioning ethnocentric ideas regarding the definition of old age, retirement, caregiving, and grandparenthood. Globalization has complicated cross-cultural research as national and cultural boundaries are increasingly understood as dynamic and historically contingent products of competing international political and cultural forces. Cultural ideas and beliefs are shared via electronic media at an unprecedented rate, and the values associated with specific cultural groups become taxed under new forms of economic exploitation or pressure. Medicalization has substantively changed the scope of geroanthropology. It has also compelled social-scientific researchers to couch their projects in terms of biomedical categories, contributing to an increasing emphasis upon short-term, problem-, or crisis-oriented research rather than longitudinal or prospective studies. This may have the unintended effect of further stigmatizing diagnosed persons as being artificially divorced from society.

These processes have encouraged gerontological research to work toward problem-solving rather than theory-building and ironically may have compartmentalized the experiences of elders while working toward their increased status and social integration. Research with or of the aged or about the aging process itself must remain as holistic as possible in order to encapsulate the complexity of social and physical experience at the end of life. The status of elders varies within and across cultural groups. The current study of cross-cultural variation tends not to focus on documenting these differences but instead looks at the effects of privilege and disadvantage on particular classes of elders in specific situations or alternatively examines meanings and values elders create as active participants in society.