Chapter 5
Web Book: Culture and the Meaning of a Good Old Age
Christine Fry, Jeanette Dickerson-Putman, Patricia Draper, Charlotte Ikels, Jennie Keith, Anthony P. Glascock and Henry C. Harpending
This chapter details the work of Project AGE (Age, Generation and Experience), the first serious ethnographically-based cross-cultural study of aging. Here a team of anthropologists carried out a comparison of aging in Hong Kong, Botswana, rural Ireland and two American communities, combining long-term fieldwork with a precise and consistent research protocol. In Part II Web, Keith discusses one of the other communities studied in Project AGE, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Readers should also relate this chapter to the Lamb Part I and two newer global projects: “Aging as a Human Condition,” https://projects.au.dk/thegoodoldlife/ and ASSA – Anthropology of Smart Phones and Smart Aging https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/assa/.