The Maa of East Africa are a cluster of related pastoral peoples who share a social organization based on age. This groups men into life-long cohorts from their initiation in youth, regardless of family wealth. Historically, this type of pre-market society has been described in every continent, but East Africa provides the principal surviving region of age-based societies, among whom the Maasai are the best known. In this volume, comparison between three branches of Maa highlights different aspects of their society: the dynamics of power with age and gender among the Maasai, of ritual performance and belief among the Samburu, and of historical change among the Chamus. Here it is argued that understanding another culture can only be approached through models derived in the first instance from the representations conveyed by members of that culture. The social anthropologist may then elaborate these images through the choice of analytical parallels, even extending to other disciplines and personal experience. Each chapter in this volume views Maa institutions through a different lens, exploring models relevant to a comprehensive analysis of their social life.

"Youth culture is not an invention of 20th-century movies and television; youth have been forming their own cultures from the moment they were given space to invent their own ways of relating to one another and to their parents and communities. Taking a global approach and beginning in early modern Europe, the essays in the Oxford Handbook of the History of Youth Culture provide broadly contextualized case studies of the ways in which the meanings and expressions of both "youth" and "culture" have evolved through time and space. The authors show that youth culture has been shaped by geography, ethnicity, class, gender, faith, technology, and myriad other factors. Examining subjects ranging from monastic schools to online communities, from enslaved youth in the Caribbean to Indigenous students at government sanctioned boarding schools, from youthful entrepreneurs to youthful activists, from war to sexuality, and from art to literature, the essays show that there have been many youth cultures. Throughout, authors emphasize the ways in which the idea of youth culture could become contested terrain-between youth and their families, their communities, and the culture at large-as well as the importance of youth agency in carving out separate lives. Among the tensions explored are the struggle between control and independence, as well as the explicit and implicit differences between male and female constructions of youth culture"--

This two-volume encyclopedia looks at the lives of teenagers around the world, examining topics from a typical school day to major issues that teens face today, including bullying, violence, sexuality, and social and financial pressures. Teenagers are living in a rapidly changing and increasingly interconnected yet unequal world. Whether they live in Australia or Zimbabwe, they have in common that they are between childhood and adulthood and increasingly aware of how inequality is affecting their lives and futures. This encyclopedia gives a different perspective based on the experiences of teens in 60 countries. Each entry gives the reader a brief sketch of a country to helps readers to understand how geography, history, economics, and politics shape teen life. The entries include a country overview and cover the following topics: Schooling and Education; Extracurricular Activities: Art, Music, and Sports; Family and Social Life; Religions and Cultural Rites of Passage; Rights and Legal Status; and Issues Today. Special sidebars, called Teen Voices, appear throughout the text, and include a description of a typical day in the life of a teen in various countries. Students will be able to gain a better understanding of what life is like around the world for their peers and will be able to easily make cross-cultural comparisons between different countries.

This textbook introduces readers to the academic scholarship on the history of childhood and youth in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on the colonial and postcolonial eras. In a series of seven chapters, it addresses key themes in the historical scholarship, arguing that age serves as a useful category for historical analysis in African history. Just as race, class, and gender can be used to understand how African societies have been structured over time, so too age is a powerful tool for thinking about how power, youth, and seniority intersect and change over time. This is, then, a work of synthesis rather than of new research based on primary sources. This book will therefore introduce mainstream scholars of the history of childhood and youth to the literature on Africa, and scholars of youth in Africa to debates within the wider field of the history of children and youth.

Social isolation and loneliness are serious yet underappreciated public health risks that affect a significant portion of the older adult population. Approximately one-quarter of community-dwelling Americans aged 65 and older are considered to be socially isolated, and a significant proportion of adults in the United States report feeling lonely. People who are 50 years of age or older are more likely to experience many of the risk factors that can cause or exacerbate social isolation or loneliness, such as living alone, the loss of family or friends, chronic illness, and sensory impairments. Over a life course, social isolation and loneliness may be episodic or chronic, depending upon an individual's circumstances and perceptions. A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that social isolation presents a major risk for premature mortality, comparable to other risk factors such as high blood pressure, smoking, or obesity. As older adults are particularly high-volume and high-frequency users of the health care system, there is an opportunity for health care professionals to identify, prevent, and mitigate the adverse health impacts of social isolation and loneliness in older adults. Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults summarizes the evidence base and explores how social isolation and loneliness affect health and quality of life in adults aged 50 and older, particularly among low income, underserved, and vulnerable populations. This report makes recommendations specifically for clinical settings of health care to identify those who suffer the resultant negative health impacts of social isolation and loneliness and target interventions to improve their social conditions. Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults considers clinical tools and methodologies, better education and training for the health care workforce, and dissemination and implementation that will be important for translating research into practice, especially as the evidence base for effective interventions continues to flourish.

As the United States and the rest of the world face the unprecedented challenge of aging populations, this volume draws together for the first time state-of-the-art work from the emerging field of the demography of aging. The nine chapters, written by experts from a variety of disciplines, highlight data sources and research approaches, results, and proposed strategies on a topic with major policy implications for labor forces, economic well-being, health care, and the need for social and family supports.

Researchers recognize that theoretical frameworks and models of child development and family dynamics have historically overlooked the ways in which developmental processes are shaped by socio-cultural contexts. Ecological and acculturation frameworks are especially central to understanding the experiences of immigrant populations, and current research has yielded new conceptual and methodological tools for documenting the cultural and developmental processes of children and their families. Within this broad arena, a question of central importance is on how gender roles in immigrant families play out in the lives of children and families. Gender Roles in Immigrant Families places gender at the forefront of the research by investigating how it interplays with parental roles, parent–child relationships, and child outcomes.