Encounters With Aging

Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America

By: Margaret M. Lock

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Paperback | 30 May 1995 | Edition Number 1

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439 Pages

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22.66 x 15.22 x 2.94

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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.

Industry Reviews

"Lock's focus on menopause as a point of departure for discussing nature/culture dichotomies makes for a brilliant addition to the growing literature on the anthropology of the human body."--"Library Journal

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List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Scientific Discourse and Aging Women
Japan: Maturity and Konenki	p. 1
The Turn of Life - Unstable Meanings	p. 3
Probabilities and Konenki	p. 31
Resignation, Resistance, Satisfaction - Narratives of Maturity	p. 46
The Pathology of Modernity	p. 78
Faltering Discipline and the Ailing Family	p. 107
Illusion of Indolence - Ideology and Partial Truths	p. 135
Odd Women Out	p. 171
Controlled Selves and Tempered Bodies	p. 202
Peering Behind the Platitudes - Rituals of Resistance	p. 233
The Doctoring of Konenki	p. 256
"Invisible Messengers"	p. 299
From Dodging Time to Deficiency Disease	p. 301
The Making of Menopause	p. 303
Against Nature - Menopause as Herald of Decay	p. 330
"An Act of Freedom"	p. 368
Epilogue: The Politics of Aging - Flashes of Immortality	p. 370
Notes	p. 389
Bibliography	p. 401
Index	p. 429
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Encounters With Aging

Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

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