With the greying of the population in Western industrialized nations and
the resultant problems, interest has increasingly been drawn to the
construction of old age in historical periods and non-European
societies. Asia has been the focus of considerable attention in this
context due on the one hand to values such as filial piety or the
prevalence of the seniority principle which many Asian cultures are
credited with and which are thought to contribute to creating a cultural
climate especially favourable to the elderly in this region of the
world, and to recurrant reports of a tradition of abandonment of the
elderly on the other, which also attest to a darker side of this issue.
In 17 contributions that geographically span the area from India to
China and Japan and historically cover periods from the earliest times
of literate cultures to the present, the volume presents new findings on
both the valuation of aging in the various intellectual and religious
traditions of Asia, and the actual living conditions of the elderly in
this region of the world in a cross-cultural perspective. The
considerable historical and regional variation in the conceptions of old
age and the - often surprising - determinants of the status of the
elderly, as they are documented in this volume, should also contribute
to enrich socio-gerontological discussion on a more general level.