Sarah Lamb

Euro-American notions of successful and healthy aging are taking root globally, shaped and inflected by local cultural and political contexts. India is one place where globally inflected discourses of healthy, active, and successful aging are on the rise. However, notions about just what constitutes healthy aging and how to achieve such a goal do not play out the same way across the globe. This article explores how older Indians of diverse social classes are thinking about their own lives in relation to broader discourses of healthy aging circulating within India and abroad. Analyses of in-depth interviews with 25 individuals (11 women and 14 men, ages 57 to 81, across a range of social classes) reveal that while many among the urban elite are enjoying participating in a globally informed healthy-aging culture, such trends are not at all widespread among the non-elite. Moreover, Indians across social classes tend to interpret their own “healthy aging” goals in ways at odds with their perceptions of Western paradigms of healthy and successful aging, sometimes incorporating critiques of the West into their own reflections about health and well-being in later life. By examining how healthy-successful aging ideologies play out across divergent national-cultural and social-class contexts, our aim is to challenge universalizing models and heighten understanding of social inequalities while opening up a wider set of possibilities for imagining what it is to live meaningfully in later life.

Today, the majority of the world’s population lives in a country with falling marriage rates, a phenomenon with profound impacts on women, gender, and sexuality. In this exceptionally crafted ethnography, Sarah Lamb probes the gendered trend of single women in India, examining what makes living outside of marriage for women increasingly possible and yet incredibly challenging. Featuring the stories of never-married women as young as 35 and as old as 92, this book offers a remarkable portrait of a way of life experienced by women across class and caste divides. For women in India, complex social-cultural and political-economic contexts are foundational to their lives and decisions, and remaining unmarried is often an unintended consequence of other pressing life priorities. Arguing that never-married women are able to illuminate their society’s broader social-cultural values, Lamb offers a new and startling look at prevailing systems in India today.

This article examines U.S. endeavors to eradicate old age. Drawing on research with older, mostly white, Americans across social classes, I probe how older people engage in “healthy,” “successful” aging as a moral project, health identity, and way of approaching the life course. Moving beyond influential literature on biopolitics and biomedicine that tends to treat medicine, science, and biopolitical governance as overdetermined causal forces, I explore instead how a confluence of factors—including cultural ideologies of personhood and independence, medical interventions, social hierarchies, and individual experiences—together lead to the stigmatization of oldness. Social inequalities also matter, as an ethos of self‐care and individual agency to ward off oldness is most pronounced among the able‐bodied and socioeconomic elite. The aim is to illuminate the convergence of factors that stigmatize oldness in contemporary North America, while highlighting the ways that class profoundly figures in people's varied attempts to not be old.

This article explores the stories of single women living in the urban metropolis of Kolkata, and in smaller towns and villages of West Bengal, as a means to illuminate emerging possibilities and constraints of selfhood for women in contemporary India. In so doing, the piece examines the ways gendered identities intersect with other forces and ideals at stake, including the institution of heterosexual marriage, class mobilities, and values surrounding individualist versus relational personhood. Because they are positioned outside the norm, those who live singly offer an unusually insightful perspective on their wider society's values and institutions. In these ways, the narratives of three single women and others each illuminate their tellers’ intricate subjectivities as well as offer broader social‐cultural critique. Their stories reveal the ambiguity, painful consequences, and sometimes hopefulness surrounding the “choice” to be single for women and suggest that social recognition and belonging are even more important than independence and true singlehood in the lives of those who live outside marriage in India. [belonging, class, gender, self, sexuality, marriage]

The current North American successful aging movement offers a particular normative model of how to age well, one tied to specific notions of individualist personhood especially valued in North America emphasizing independence, productivity, self-maintenance, and the individual self as project. This successful aging paradigm, with its various incarnations as active, healthy and productive aging, has received little scrutiny as to its cultural assumptions. Drawing on fieldwork data with elders from both India and the United States, this article offers an analysis of cultural assumptions underlying the North American successful aging paradigm as represented in prevailing popular and scientific discourse on how to age well. Four key themes in this public successful aging discourse are examined: individual agency and control; maintaining productive activity; the value of independence and importance of avoiding dependence; and permanent personhood, a vision of the ideal person as not really aging at all in late life, but rather maintaining the self of one's earlier years. Although the majority of the (Boston-area, well-educated, financially privileged) US elders making up this study, and some of the most cosmopolitan Indians, embrace and are inspired by the ideals of the successful aging movement, others critique the prevailing successful aging model for insufficiently incorporating attention to and acceptance of the human realities of mortality and decline. Ultimately, the article argues that the vision offered by the dominant successful aging paradigm is not only a particular cultural and biopolitical model but, despite its inspirational elements, in some ways a counterproductive one. Successful aging discourse might do well to come to better terms with conditions of human transience and decline, so that not all situations of dependence, debility and even mortality in late life will be viewed and experienced as “failures” in living well. •The cultural assumptions in successful aging discourse merit scrutiny.•Successful aging notions highlight independence, activity and agelessness.•Models of aging well in India emphasize interdependence and human transience.•We would do well to better accept the normal human conditions of dependence, decline, and death.

This article explores aging and gender as dimensions ofpersonhood in West Bengal, India. The work of aging requires unravelling bodily and emotional ties (maya) to people, places, and things, even though these ties feel compellingly stronger and more numerous as life progresses. Women differ from men in that their connections are unmade and remade at a greater number of critical junctures in their lives, not only through aging and dying, but also in marriage and widowhood. This focus on aging and gender suggests a move beyond those models of South Asian personhood that tend to be static, degendered, and based on too sharp a dichotomy between East and West, to a more nuanced understanding of the plural and evolving nature of personhood conceptions over the life course.