Home Medicine As the World Ages
book: As the World Ages
Book
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

As the World Ages

Rethinking a Demographic Crisis
  • Kavita Sivaramakrishnan
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2018
View more publications by Harvard University Press

About this book

People are living longer, not only in wealthy countries but in developing nations. For too long, Western experts have conceived of aging as a universal predicament—one that supposedly provokes the same welfare concerns in every context. It is time, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan writes, to embrace a new approach that prioritizes local agendas and values.

Reviews

This smart, ambitious book tracks ‘global aging’ as an emergent problem and site of expertise over the twentieth century. Sivaramakrishnan attends carefully to entangled debates on aging, race, chronicity, pathophysiology, and care in Africa, South Asia, North America, and Europe. As the World Ages is not only a signal intervention in the history of public health but in the analysis of decolonization and development. Just as importantly, it offers a long overdue reorientation for social scientific approaches to old age.
-- Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, The Bad Family, and Other Modern Things

The academic discourse on aging has long been dominated by assumptions that privileged the West. Sivaramakrishnan’s groundbreaking and well-researched history brilliantly unpacks these assumptions. It also drives home a fundamental distinction between the narratives of industrialization and globalization: the former promoted a stadial and homogenizing view of world history, the latter connects and yet highlights local differences. A thoughtful and impressive book.
-- Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

As the World Ages is a superb book that brings together intellectual, institutional, and medical history to show how aging emerged as a global problem in the second half of the twentieth century. Ranging widely across sites and archives and scholarly fields, while rooted in a deep understanding of the Indian context, this will be essential reading for scholars across many disciplines, from public health to postcolonial history.
-- Sunil Amrith, author of Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants

Ambitious and impressive…presents a compelling and nuanced analysis of how aging has become a global problem and a domain of expertise…Sivaramakrishnan offers new, dynamic understandings of how aging has been linked to issues of health, family, labor, and social policy…Essential reading for any anthropologist or social scientist who studies aging…[A] rich and nuanced book.
-- Jessica C. Robbins Medical Anthropology Quarterly


Publicly Available Download PDF
i

Publicly Available Download PDF
vii

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
Download PDF
1

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
Download PDF
22

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
Download PDF
59

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
Download PDF
86

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
Download PDF
110

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
Download PDF
131

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
Download PDF
169

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
Download PDF
196

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
Download PDF
219

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
Download PDF
221

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
Download PDF
297

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
Download PDF
305

Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
May 7, 2018
eBook ISBN:
9780674919839
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
260
Other:
1 table
Downloaded on 25.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.4159/9780674919839/html
Scroll to top button