Abstract
This chapter highlights responses-from the West and beyond-to fundamental cultural and moral questions ageing poses: Where are the best sites of elder care: the individual, the family, the market or the state? How do we deal with the transience of the human condition? Must situations of frailty and decline entail the loss of social personhood? What does it mean to age well? Anthropologists work closely with people in diverse social-cultural settings to gain access to their complex perspectives and expose striking cultural differences, with the aim not only to understand others but also to critically examine their own societies, unsettling familiar ways of thinking and revealing underlying values.