Research Catalog

Title

Welcome to middle age! : (and other cultural fictions) / edited by Richard A. Shweder.

Publication

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Shweder, Richard A.

Description

xvii, 302 p. : ill.; 24 cm.

Summary

The idea of "midlife," and particularly the decline associated with the period, has become widespread in Euro-American culture. The symptoms of middle age are equally pervasive: back pain, mortgage payments, and an aversion to loud late-night activities. This pathology of midlife has even recently begun to be exported to all territories in the contemporary world system; people around the world are being invited to change the way they think about mature adulthood and to adopt the middle-class American version of middle age. Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions) is a welcome antidote to this epidemic, providing a refreshing examination of both this received idea of midlife and of alternative "fictions" that operate in cultures where middle age does not even constitute a life stage.

Series Statement

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation series on mental health and development. Studies on successful midlife development

Uniform Title

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation series on mental health and development. Studies on successful midlife development

Subject

Middle age > Cross-cultural studies

Genre/Form

Cross-cultural studies

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

• Introduction: welcome to middle age! / Richard A. Shweder -- Midlife discourses in the twentieth-century United States: an essay on the sexuality, ideology, and politics of "middle-ageism" / Margaret Morganroth Gullette -- Deconstructing the change: female maturation in Japan and North America / Margaret Lock -- Search for middle age in India / Sudhir Kakar -- Staus reversal: the coming of aging in Samoa / Bradd Shore -- Return of the "white man's burden": the moral discourse of anthropology and the domestic life of Hindu women / Usha Menon and Richard A. Shweder.
• Fertility and maturity in Africa: Gusii parents in middle adulthood / Robert A. LeVine and Sarah LeVine -- Children of the 1960s at midlife: generational identity and the family adaptive project / Thomas S. Weisner and Lucinda P. Bernheimer -- Place and race: midlife experience in Harlem / Katherine Newman.

ISBN

• 0226756076 (cloth : alk. paper)
• 0226756084 (paper : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^^97045115^

OCLC

• 37902418
• SCSB-13389275

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library