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Aging in Modern and Traditional Societies
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11624 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
6,199 Words |
| Author
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Ellen C. Holmes
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For those who live in the United States, it is almost impossible not be aware that aging has become an issue of importance in recent years. Hardly a day passes that we do not see newspaper or television reports on some aspect of aging or older people - human interest stories, scientific reports, coverage of problems being experienced by an individual or a group, or expressions of societal concern about how we cope with the growing number of old people. Our situation, however, is not unique.
A recent United Nations report shows that the number of aged has been increasing world wide, and the predictions are that this trend will continue. While the increase from 1975 to the year 2000 is not expected to be too dramatic, by 2025 the number of people 60 years of age or older will have increased from 8 percent to about 20 percent of the population in East Asian countries, which includes China and Japan. In other regions the change will be more gradual: an increase of from 5 percent to 7 percent in Africa and from 6 percent to 11 percent in Latin America. It is also suggested that in European countries and North America over 20 percent of the population will be 60 or older in 2025.
Life expectancy, the average number of years a person at birth can expect to live, is also on the increase everywhere. This is a general reflection of improving health technology. In many parts of the world we are seeing the effects of control or elimination of infectious diseases that often killed people long before they reached old age. Since Western industrialized societies have benefited most and longest from such developments, our life expectancy now increases very gradually.
Average life expectancy at birth in 1975-1980 was 57.6 years for the world as a whole and ranged from 48.6 years in Africa to 50.6 in South Asia, 62.5 in Latin America, and 73 in North America. These are broad world regions, and there can be much variation within region such as Africa or any other area made up of many countries with distinct cultures and different levels of development. For example, in Oceania, which consists of a vast area of the Pacific Ocean and includes industrialized nations like Australia as well as some very undeveloped areas, life expectancy in the period 1975-1980 ranged from 51 years to 73 years, with an average for all of Oceania of 65.6.
It is predicted that life expectancy will continue to increase over the next forty years, with the greatest advances occurring in countries which currently have the lowest rates. Quite simply, it seems that we will see people living longer, and consequently the aged will become a larger segment of populations throughout the world.
One of the results of the burgeoning older population in the United States is that the academic discipline of gerontology, the study of aging, has flourished in recent years as a legitimate subject of research and education. Parallel developments are occurring in many other countries as well. Since aging is a many-faceted process, we find a variety of subject areas represented within gerontology-anthropology, biology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology.
In the past it was common for anthropologists to look for the old people in their studies of other cultures in order to get more time depth and learn about general condition in "the old days"
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