Encounters with Aging - Mythologies of Menopause in Japan & North America (Paper)

1. Auflage 1995
ISBN: 978-0-520-20162-0
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 439 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 154 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 678 g

Margaret Lock explicitly compares Japanese and North American medical and political accounts of female middle age to challenge Western assumptions about menopause. She uses ethnography, interviews, statistics, historical and popular culture materials, and medical publications to produce a richly detailed account of Japanese women's lives. The result offers irrefutable evidence that the experience and meanings—even the endocrinological changes—associated with female midlife are far from universal. Rather, Lock argues, they are the product of an ongoing dialectic between culture and local biologies.

Japanese focus on middle-aged women as family members, and particularly as caretakers of elderly relatives. They attach relatively little importance to the end of menstruation, seeing it as a natural part of the aging process and not a diseaselike state heralding physical decline and emotional instability. Even the symptoms of midlife are different: Japanese women report few hot flashes, for example, but complain frequently of stiff shoulders.

Articulate, passionate, and carefully documented, Lock's study systematically undoes the many preconceptions about aging women in two distinct cultural settings. Because it is rooted in the everyday lives of Japanese women, it also provides an excellent entree to Japanese society as a whole.

Aging and menopause are subjects that have been closeted behind our myths, fears, and misconceptions. Margaret Lock's cross-cultural perspective gives us a critical new lens through which to examine our assumptions.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lock, Margaret M.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophische Anthropologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Altersgruppen Erwachsenensoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Ethnomedizin
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Humanbiologie Physische Anthropologie, Paläoanthropologie, Evolutionäre Anthropologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Scientific Discourse and Aging Women

PART I JAPAN: MATURITY AND KONENKI
1 The Turn of Life-Unstable Meanings
2 Probabilities and Konenki
3 Resignation, Resistance, Satisfaction-
Narratives of Maturity
4 The Pathology of Modernity
5 Faltering Discipline and the Ailing Family
6 Illusion of Indolence-Ideology and Partial Truths
7 Odd Women Out
8 Controlled Selves and Tempered Bodies
9 Peering Behind the Platitudes-Rituals of Resistance
10 The Doctoring of Konenki
"Invisible Messengers"

PART II FROM DODGING TIME TO DEFICIENCY DISEASE
11 The Making of Menopause
12 Against Nature-Menopause as Herald of Decay
"An Act of Freedom"
Epilogue: The Politics of Aging-
Flashes of Immortality

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Margaret Lock is Professor Emerita in the Departments of Social Studies of Medicine and Anthropology at McGill University. She is coeditor of Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life (California, 1993) and author of East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan (California, 1980). In 2003, she was awarded the Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology, of the American Anthropology Association.