John W. Traphagan

Amane Kaneko

Future Jazz, That 13th Century Buddhist Monk, and the Invention of Cultures

Embracing Uncertainty

Examines the cultural construction of senility in Japan and the moral implications of dependent behavior for older Japanese.

Aging Bodies and the Fear of Senility in Japan

Taming Oblivion

John Knight

A demographic and ethnographic exploration of how the aging Japanese society is affecting the family. Incorporating qualitative and quantitative data and research methods from both demography and social anthropology, this book explores demographic trends in contemporary Japan's rapidly aging society. The contributors describe and analyze trends by addressing the ways in which demographic change is experienced in the context of family. The book considers the social effects, welfare issues, and private and public responses to demographic change and how this change has influenced the experiences of family caregivers and the elderly themselves. It offers both a specific regional contribution to the emerging field of demographic anthropology and an anthropological contribution to cross-disciplinary research on aging. There is a lot that can be gleaned from this volume about changing patterns of Japanese kinship and concepts of welfare and morality.  Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute "This important intellectual contribution is an effort to integrate those fields that are often artificially separated in academia. This book is interesting, novel, and timely."  Akiko Hashimoto, author of The Gift of Generations: Japanese and American Perspectives on Aging and the Social Contract Contributors include Naomi Brown, Brenda Robb Jenike, Toshiko Kaneda, Satsuki Kawano, John Knight, C. Scott Littleton, Susan Orpett Long, James M. Raymo, Leng Leng Thang, Christopher S. Thompson, and John W. Traphagan.

Demographic Change and the Family in Japan's Aging Society

Examines the cultural construction of senility in Japan and the moral implications of dependent behavior for older Japanese. Taming Oblivion examines the cultural construction of senility in Japan and the moral implications of dependent behavior for older Japanese. While the biomedical construction of senility-as-pathology has become increasingly the norm in North America, in Japan a folk category of senility exists known as boke. Although symptomatically and conceptually overlapping with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of senile dementia, boke is distinguished from unambiguously pathological conditions. Rather than being viewed as a disease, boke is seen as an illness over which people have some degree of control. John Traphagan’s ethnographic study of older Japanese explores their experiences as they contemplate and attempt to prevent or delay the boke condition. John W. Traphagan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Gerontological Anthropology at California State University, Fullerton.

John W. Traphagan

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