Long Lives

A Stanford University Press classic.

How do Tibetans in India's Darjeeling Hills understand the life-span and various life-forces that influence longevity? This book analyses ethnographic and textual material demonstrating how Tibetans utilise temporal frameworks in medical, astrological, divinatory, and ritual contexts to locate and reckon life-forces influencing their life-spans.

Long Lives Are for the Rich is the title of a silent ominous program that affects the lives of millions of people. In all developed countries disadvantaged and, especially, poor people die much earlier than the most advantaged. During these shorter lives they suffer ten to twenty years longer from disabilities or chronic disease. This does not happen accidentally: health inequalities – including those between healthy and unhealthy life styles – are mainly caused by social inequalities that are reproduced over the life course. This crucial function of the life course has become painfully visible during its neoliberal reorganization since the early 1980s. Studies about aging over the life course, from birth to death, show the inhumane consequences as people get older. In spite of the enormous wealth that has been piled up in the US for a dwindling percentage of the population, there has been growing public indifference about the needs of those in jobs with low pay and high stress, but also about citizens from a broad middle class who can hardly afford high quality education or healthcare. However, this ominous program affects all: recent mortality rates show that all Americans, including the rich, are unhealthier and dying earlier than citizens of other developed countries. Moreover, the underlying social inequalities are tearing the population apart with nasty consequences for all citizens, including the rich. Although the public awareness of the consequences has been growing, neoliberal policies remain tempting for the economic and political elites of the developed world because of the enormous wealth that is flowing to the top. All this poses urgent questions of social justice. Unfortunately, the predominant studies of social justice along the life course help to reproduce these inequalities by neglecting them. This book analyzes the main dynamics of social inequality over the life course and proposes a theory of social justice that sketches a way forward for a country that is willing to invest in its greatest resource: the creative potential of its population.

The Last Years of Long Lives is a unique account of that period of old age which precedes death. Based on 400 complete individual histories and covering a twenty-year period, it looks at the experiences of people over eighty years old in three important areas: disability, family life and health care. Using the life-course approach to research, it reveals rich data about the contributions of formal and informal care and how life expectancy and experiences of disability interact with experiences of care. The reader is invited to conceptualise these phenomena as processes in continuous time - processes that are sometimes long and complex, sometimes short and simple - and learns about the four types of disability career before death. At the same time, the author presents a three-stage model of informal care and examines the main patterns of formal service use. The Last Years of Long Lives presents a new way of looking at old age for students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers and gives a comprehensive picture of what has been called 'the fourth age'.

A World War Love Story Two small people who grew up in modest circumstances, in different states, met on a blind-date that neither wanted to accept. Yet, it led to a marriage that lasted 70 happy years and included a surprising array of activities.

Traditional histories of medieval art and architecture often privilege the moment of a work’s creation, yet surviving works designated as "medieval" have long and expansive lives. Many have extended prehistories emerging from their sites and contexts of creation, and most have undergone a variety of interventions, including adaptations and restorations, since coming into being. The lives of these works have been further extended through historiography, museum exhibitions, and digital media. Inspired by the literary category of biography and the methods of longue durée historians, the introduction and seventeen chapters of this volume provide an extended meditation on the longevity of medieval works of art and the aspect of time as a factor in shaping our interpretations of them. While the metaphor of "lives" invokes associations with the origin of the discipline of art history, focus is shifted away from temporal constraints of a single human lifespan or generation to consider the continued lives of medieval works even into our present moment. Chapters on works from the modern countries of Italy, France, England, Spain, and Germany are drawn together here by the thematic threads of essence and continuity, transformation, memory and oblivion, and restoration. Together, they tell an object-oriented history of art and architecture that is necessarily entangled with numerous individuals and institutions.