Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession: Global Perspectives (Global Perspectives on Aging) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813585333 ISBN 13: 9780813585338

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2017

Synopsis

In recent decades, the North American public has pursued an inspirational vision of successful aging—striving through medical technique and individual effort to eradicate the declines, vulnerabilities, and dependencies previously commonly associated with old age. On the face of it, this bold new vision of successful, healthy, and active aging is highly appealing. But it also rests on a deep cultural discomfort with aging and being old.
 
The contributors to Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession explore how the successful aging movement is playing out across five continents. Their chapters investigate a variety of people, including Catholic nuns in the United States; Hindu ashram dwellers; older American women seeking plastic surgery; aging African-American lesbians and gay men in the District of Columbia; Chicago home health care workers and their aging clients; Mexican men foregoing Viagra; dementia and Alzheimer sufferers in the United States and Brazil; and aging policies in Denmark, Poland, India, China, Japan, and Uganda. This book offers a fresh look at a major cultural and public health movement of our time, questioning what has become for many a taken-for-granted goal—aging in a way that almost denies aging itself.
 

About this title

About the Author

SARAH LAMB is a professor of anthropology at Brandeis University. She is the author of White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in North India.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813585333
• ISBN 13: 9780813585338
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Lamb Sarah