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This rich ethnography explores beliefs and practices surrounding aging in a rural Bengali village. Sarah Lamb focuses on how villagers' visions of aging are tied to the making and unmaking of gendered selves and social relations over a lifetime. Lamb uses a focus on age as a means not only to open up new ways of thinking about South Asian social life, but also to contribute to contemporary theories of gender, the body, and culture, which have been hampered, the book argues, by a static focus on youth.
Lamb's own experiences in the village are an integral part of her book and ably convey the cultural particularities of rural Bengali life and Bengali notions of modernity. In exploring ideals of family life and the intricate interrelationships between and within generations, she enables us to understand how people in the village construct, and deconstruct, their lives. At the same time her study extends beyond India to contemporary attitudes about aging in the United States. This accessible and engaging book is about deeply human issues and will appeal not only to specialists in South Asian culture, but to anyone interested in families, aging, gender, religion, and the body.
Lamb's own experiences in the village are an integral part of her book and ably convey the cultural particularities of rural Bengali life and Bengali notions of modernity. In exploring ideals of family life and the intricate interrelationships between and within generations, she enables us to understand how people in the village construct, and deconstruct, their lives. At the same time her study extends beyond India to contemporary attitudes about aging in the United States. This accessible and engaging book is about deeply human issues and will appeal not only to specialists in South Asian culture, but to anyone interested in families, aging, gender, religion, and the body.
Price: $33.95
Pages: 323
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
22 June 2000
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520220010
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
Sarah Lamb is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University.
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Preface
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction: Perspectives through Age
Culture, Gender, and Multivocality
The Anthropology of Aging
The Body in Postmodern and Feminist Anthropology
Living in Mangaldihi
PART I: PERSONS AND FAMILIES
Personhoods
Entering a Net of Maya in Mangaldihi
Open Persons and Substantial Exchanges
Studying Persons Cross-culturally
2 Family Moral Systems
Defining Age
Long-Term Relations: Reciprocity and Indebtedness
Centrality and Peripherality
Hierarchies: Serving and Blessing
3 Conflicting Generations: Unreciprocated
Houseflows in a Modern Society
Contrary Pulls
The Degenerate Ways of Modern Society
Three Lives
PART II: AGING AND DYING
4 White Saris and Sweet Mangoes, Partings and Ties
The Problem of Maya
Loosening Ties, Disassembling Persons
Pilgrims, Beggars, and Old Age Home Dwellers
The Joys and Perils of Remaining "Hot" and Central, Even in a Ripe Old Age
The Values of Attachment and Renunciation
5 Dealing with Mortality
"How Am I Going to Die?"
Rituals of Death: Making and Remaking Persons and Families
Cutting Maya, the Separating of Ties
Extending Continuities
PART III: GENDERED TRANSFORMATIONS
6 Transformations of Gender and Gendered
Transformations
Gendered Bodies and Everyday Practices
Competing Perspectives: Everyday Forms of Resistance
The Changes of Age
Women, Maya, and Aging
7 A Widow's Bonds
Becoming a Widow
Sexuality and Slander, Devotion and Destruction
Unseverable Bonds
Afterword
Notes
Glossary
References
Index
List of Tables
Preface
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction: Perspectives through Age
Culture, Gender, and Multivocality
The Anthropology of Aging
The Body in Postmodern and Feminist Anthropology
Living in Mangaldihi
PART I: PERSONS AND FAMILIES
Personhoods
Entering a Net of Maya in Mangaldihi
Open Persons and Substantial Exchanges
Studying Persons Cross-culturally
2 Family Moral Systems
Defining Age
Long-Term Relations: Reciprocity and Indebtedness
Centrality and Peripherality
Hierarchies: Serving and Blessing
3 Conflicting Generations: Unreciprocated
Houseflows in a Modern Society
Contrary Pulls
The Degenerate Ways of Modern Society
Three Lives
PART II: AGING AND DYING
4 White Saris and Sweet Mangoes, Partings and Ties
The Problem of Maya
Loosening Ties, Disassembling Persons
Pilgrims, Beggars, and Old Age Home Dwellers
The Joys and Perils of Remaining "Hot" and Central, Even in a Ripe Old Age
The Values of Attachment and Renunciation
5 Dealing with Mortality
"How Am I Going to Die?"
Rituals of Death: Making and Remaking Persons and Families
Cutting Maya, the Separating of Ties
Extending Continuities
PART III: GENDERED TRANSFORMATIONS
6 Transformations of Gender and Gendered
Transformations
Gendered Bodies and Everyday Practices
Competing Perspectives: Everyday Forms of Resistance
The Changes of Age
Women, Maya, and Aging
7 A Widow's Bonds
Becoming a Widow
Sexuality and Slander, Devotion and Destruction
Unseverable Bonds
Afterword
Notes
Glossary
References
Index