Old Age: Cultural and Critical Perspectives

Despite numerous review articles and programmatic essays surveying the social and cultural anthropology of old age (2, 13, 14,41,47,53,55,79,82, 99, 102, 103), a theme in many of them is the relative paucity of anthropologi­ cal attention to the topic. In 1967 Clark made the classic observation that "if one is to judge from typical anthropological accounts, the span of years be­ tween the achievement of adult status and one's funerary rites is either an ethnographic vacuum or a vast monotonous plateau of invariable behavior" (13). Clark's criticism, opening anthropology's future while closing its past to old age, was soon routinized into a requisite lament preceding many essays on the anthropology of aging (79). This gerontological lament did not, however, correlate with the writing of actual monographs. In 1980, after thirteen years and much productive research by many scholars, Fry could still begin her edited anthology by noting that "anthropology has a long history of being interested in age, but not in aging or the aged" (41). Similarly, in 1981 Amoss & Harrell offered an anthology to "help to remedy a massive neglect of old age by the discipline of anthropol­ ogy" (2); and in 1984 Keith & Kertzer began their introduction to another anthology by again drawing attention to the need in anthropology to "pay more systematic attention to the role of age in human societies and cultural sys-