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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Localizing senility: illness and agency among older Japanese | | Author(s) | John W Traphagan |
| Journal title | Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, vol 13, no 1, 1998 |
| Pages | pp 81-98 |
| Keywords | Dementia ; Biological ageing ; Japan ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | For many Japanese, fear about senility is not primarily expressed in relation to pathological conditions like Alzheimer's disease (AD). Instead, as people grow older, their concern focuses on a widely recognised category of decline in older age which, although symptomatically and conceptually overlapping with AD and other forms of senile dementia, is distinguished from unambiguously pathological conditions. This article examines the meaning and experience of this condition, known as boke, and shows that senility in Japan is culturally constructed in a way distinct from the clinical biomedical construction of senility-as-pathology which has become the norm in the US. Rather than being a disease, boke is viewed as an illness over which people are believed to have some degree of control in relation to its onset - through activity, particularly within the context of groups, it may be prevented or at least delayed. The data discussed also suggest the importance of culture in defining the meanings of normal or abnormal ageing. (AKM). |
| Accession Number | CPA-981104405 A |
| Classmark | EA: BH: 7DT: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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