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

ปกหน้า
University of California Press, 20 ม.ค. 1994 - 439 หน้า
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.

จากด้านในหนังสือ

เนื้อหา

IV
3
V
31
VI
46
VII
78
VIII
107
IX
135
X
171
XI
202
XIV
299
XV
301
XVI
303
XVII
330
XVIII
368
XIX
370
XX
389
XXI
401

XII
233
XIII
256

ฉบับอื่นๆ - ดูทั้งหมด

คำและวลีที่พบบ่อย

บทความที่เป็นที่นิยม

หน้า 425 - THE CHANGE OF LIFE IN HEALTH AND DISEASE: a Practical Treatise on the Nervous and other Affections incidental to Women at the Decline of Life. Second Edition. 8vo. cloth, 6s.
หน้า 331 - Woman has ended her existence as bearer of a future life, and has reached her natural end — her partial death — as servant of the species. She is now engaged in an active struggle against her decline.
หน้า 118 - All people shall have the right to maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living. In all spheres of life, the State shall use its endeavors for the promotion and extension of social welfare and security, and of public health.
หน้า 335 - For, as pointed out, clinical observation suggests that in female experience an "inner space" is at the center of despair even as it is the very center of potential fulfillment. Emptiness is the female form of perdition — known at times to men of the inner Me ( whom we will discuss later ) , but standard experience for all women.
หน้า xxxv - ... jobs, it is necessary for her to be attractive, to please; she is allowed no hold on the world save through the mediation of some man.
หน้า 135 - ... be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls ; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use...
หน้า xxii - ... and by a series of reflective acts, I then seek to unite it with a certain living object composed of a nervous system, a brain, glands, digestive, respiratory, and circulatory organs whose very matter is capable of being analyzed chemically into atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, etc., then I am going to encounter insurmountable difficulties. But these difficulties all stem from the fact that I try to unite my consciousness not with my body but with the body of others.
หน้า 321 - Woman's sexual needs have less of a mental character because, generally speaking, her mental life is less developed. These needs are more closely related to the needs of the organism, following rather than leading them, and consequently find in them an efficient restraint. Being a more instinctive creature than man, woman has only to follow her instincts to find calmness and peace.
หน้า 331 - Rid of her duties, she finds freedom at last. Unfortunately, in every woman's story recurs the fact we have verified throughout the history of woman: she finds this freedom at the very time when she can make no use of it. This recurrence is in no wise due to chance: patriarchal society gave all the feminine functions the aspect of a service, and woman escapes slavery only at times when she loses all effectiveness.

ข้อมูลอ้างอิงหนังสือเล่มนี้

เกี่ยวกับผู้แต่ง (1994)

Margaret Lock is Professor Emerita 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.

บรรณานุกรม