Description
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.
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Many of us believe we recognize the symptoms of middle age: lower back pain, mortgages, and an aversion to loud late-night activities. This particular construction of midlife, most often rendered in chronological, biological, and medical terms, has become an accepted reality to European-Americans and has recently spread to such non-Western capitals as Tokyo and New Delhi. Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions) explores the significance of this pervasive cultural representation alongside the alternative "fictions" that represent the life course in other regions of the world where middle age does not exist. In this volume, anthropologists, behavioral scientists, and historians explore topics ranging from the Western ideology of "midlife decline" to cultural representations of mature adulthood that operate without the category of middle age. The result is a fascinating, panoramic collection that explores the myths surrounding and the representations of mature adulthood and of those years in the life span from thirty to seventy.
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