Integrating Aging into Anthropology Curricula

Abstract

No matter their subfield or specialization, anthropologists are well prepared to help students understand human aging. Many demur that they don’t know enough about aging to teach about it, but the disciplinary foundation is already securely in place. Ethnographers have long relied on oral histories and cultural knowledge shared with them by older people, regardless of whether or not aging is the focus of a particular study. In research and in teaching, anthropologists are careful to highlight shifts in kinship, residence, employment patterns and perceptions of mental and physical well-being. Positioning elders in these dynamic processes is important because changes in the lives of older people can be bellwether indicators of larger, intergenerational shifts in cultural and economic circumstances. Consider, for example, a New York Times frontpage feature on social isolation among older immigrants, identified as “America’s fastest-growing immigrant group” (“Invisible Immigrants, Old and Left with ‘Nobody to Talk to’” October 31, 2009). Whether one’s course is a graduate seminar in linguistics, a class in biological anthropology, or a four-field undergraduate survey, this article is replete with examples for discussion and analysis. The web version offers links to the Muslim Support Network, Center for Health Policy Research, Migration Policy Center and a number of research scholars. These electronic contacts that can help students to contextualize the small, California-based “100 Years Living Club” that Patricia Leigh Brown reports on in this article within larger regional, national and global frames. Anthropological approaches to aging reveal rich sources of ethnographic data and also enhance students’ preparation for conducting field research, writing ethnographies and contributing to the development of anthropological theory. Until now, however, the anthropology of aging has been largely overlooked as a source for illustrating and theorizing about the full range of human cultural and biological experience. Often restricted to special-topic courses, emphasis on aging and the life course has been segregated from core curricula the way full attention to constructions of race and gender once was, and with similar distorting consequences. Aging can be an uncomfortable subject, and one solution is to relegate it to elective status where it can be passively supported but safely left to the “experts.” The curricular impact is that a majority of students are denied the opportunity to explore the meanings of a universal but culturally variable biological experience within an anthropological paradigm. One might assume that traditional college-age students would be resistant to course material on aging, finding little of interest in, say, changing relations among Japanese mothers and daughters-in-law or explanations for dementia among people with very different worldviews. I have found instead that young adults can be particularly open and receptive to cross-cultural discussions of family life in old age, widowhood, frailty and practices surrounding death and bereavement. Students have many unanswered questions—some painfully personal and familial— born of silences around most aspects of social and biological aging in US society at-large. Just as knowledge of racialized, gendered and class identities is now recognized as vital for developing critical theoretical approaches to understanding structured inequality, awareness of how aging is culturally constructed promotes a more fully situated understanding of opportunities, exclusions and agency at all stages of the life course. Tracking new expectations about the roles of elders as workers, consumers, care-