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.

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."

This book offers a unique perspective on ideas about late life as expressed in social policy and socio-cultural constructs of age with lived experience.

Illustrates the complexities of the transitions faced by older adults and their family members, and offers ideas for nurses, social workers, chaplains, and other health and human service professionals in working with vulnerable aging individuals.

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.

Family caregiving affects millions of Americans every day, in all walks of life. At least 17.7 million individuals in the United States are caregivers of an older adult with a health or functional limitation. The nation's family caregivers provide the lion's share of long-term care for our older adult population. They are also central to older adults' access to and receipt of health care and community-based social services. Yet the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the least appreciated challenges facing the aging U.S. population. Families Caring for an Aging America examines the prevalence and nature of family caregiving of older adults and the available evidence on the effectiveness of programs, supports, and other interventions designed to support family caregivers. This report also assesses and recommends policies to address the needs of family caregivers and to minimize the barriers that they encounter in trying to meet the needs of older adults.

This book explores the unresolved paradox at the heart of population aging, namely how to account for the fact that death rates from most non-communicable diseases rise as people age, yet aggregate death rates from such diseases have decreased overall despite an increasingly aging population. It provides a long-term historical perspective on this issue, presenting evidence that the underpinnings of modern aging extend as far back as the nineteenth century, and that aging has boosted per capita healthcare spending. The book first outlines the three eras of the Epidemiologic Transition, taking readers from its first stage where the threat of infectious diseases loom large, through the transitional stage, and on to the modern era, where non-communicable diseases are the primary cause of death. Next, the book examines the age-profiles of people whose childhoods coincide with the different stages of the Epidemiologic Transition. Using data from England and Wales, one of the few places that have recorded the data necessary for such an exploration, the book resolves the aging paradox by studying hidden generational change. It traverses historical time and identifies the distinct socio-economic and epidemiologic childhood conditions that may appear in it. It then compares, for instance, aging of children brought up in an earlier epidemiologic stage with aging of ones raised in a modern one. In the process, it explores the influence of childhood development on aging. Overall, the book has a quantitative bent, engaging the reader with analytical issues that will help develop a deeper understanding of modern aging.