Encounters with Aging :Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America

3.79 ( 63 Ratings by Goodreads)
Encounters with Aging

Encounters with Aging :Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America

(Author)
3.79 (63 Ratings by Goodreads)
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Published: 25 May, 1995
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Description

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.
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More Details

Type Book
ISBN13 9780520201620
ISBN10 0520201620
Number Of Pages 439
Item Weight 635 g
Product Dimensions 152 x 229 x 25 mm
Publisher / Reseller University of California Press
Format paperback
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Media Reviews

"Lock's book is well written and comprehensive. Encounters with Aging uses many sources of data that range from cross-national survey research findings to lengthy ethnographic inter- views, to discussion and analysis of popular cultural representations. It reports on a long-term and mature research commitment. It represents . . .  a most important ethnographic work on gender and age." * American Anthropologist *
"Encounters with Aging is a brilliant contribution not only to medical anthropology but also to gerontology and feminist theory. Others will have to evaluate the value of the work for Japanese studies, but I can't imagine it will not be enthusiastically received there as well. The book is long, as befits its complexity . . . but unfailingly literate, incisive, and passionate. It will have a wide audience, both lay and academic." * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *

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Author's Bio

Margaret Lock is Professor 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.

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