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

By Margaret M. Lock

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520201620
• ISBN13: 9780520201620
• Release Date: May 1995
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 439 Pages
• Weight: 1.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A classic of medical anthropology

Margret Lock is a preeminent medical anthropologist, and in this work she explores the connection between culture and how people experience their own health/illness. It is difficult for non-anthropologists to understand how we think of culture. Many people think of culture as something static, rather than the web of meaning and symbols we use to interpret everything around us, including universal biological functions. Without culture, in many ways we honestly wouldn't know how to feel about anything. The mind/body connection isn't a dichotomy, rather it is a fact of our evolutionary biology. Lock shows us this in a way that the lay public can understand with concrete examples of cross-cultural parallels.

A provocative, engrossing read.

ENCOUNTERS WITH AGING is a fascinating book examining the contrasting cultural constructions of aging and menopause in Japan and North America. Lock is a medical anthropologist who has done extensive research on attitudes and practices surrounding menopause among women in Japan and North America. She juxtaposes these women's experiences with a penetrating look at the broader medical and social discourses surrounding aging in the two regions. The book serves as a revealing critique of western medical practices surrounding women and aging. I have very successfully used the book in teaching in both gender studies and medical anthropology classes. It is long yet accessible. The introductory chapter, "Scientific Discourse and Aging Women," is brilliant, witty and cutting--and could be used as a stand-alone piece--challenging readers to rethink western medical constructions of aging and women in a new, feminist light. The book complements well another of California's recent books on aging, women, the body and menopause--WHITE SARIS AND SWEET MANGOES: AGING, GENDER AND BODY IN NORTH INDIA.