Sarah Lamb

Aging, gender and widowhood: Perspectives from rural West Bengal

This paper explores widowhood in rural West Bengal from the perspective of age. Although widowhood in India has grabbed the attention of scholars and social reformers for a good century now, 1 the focus of this attention has been (usually without explicitly acknowledg ing it) on women widowed at a relatively young age. Debates over widow remarriage, the perceived dangers of a widows sexuality, a young widows anomalous childlessness etc., all—it turns out—have to do largely with the social and economic concerns surround ing young widows. For the many women widowed in late life, the social expectations and dilemmas faced are significantly different. Scrutinising such differences not only helps us understand widowhood in India better, but sheds valuable light on local constructions of gender, sexuality and age.

In/dependence, Intergenerational Uncertainty, and the Ambivalent State: Perceptions of Old Age Security in India

This essay examines competing perspectives on old age security within contemporary Indian families and society. Ideas and policies concerning old age security are intricately connected to broader cultural meanings and values—surrounding personhood, the life course, family moral systems, and perceptions of the very nature and identity of a wider society and nation. The family in India has long been viewed as the central site of ageing and elder care, yet there is a widespread perception that family-centred elder care is on the decline. Market-based options such as for-pay old age homes are on the rise among the solvent urban middle classes, along with discourses emphasising the need for older individuals to rely on themselves. At the same time, recent parental care legislation and limited state-funded social security programs emphasise that family care is best. Confronting such developments, this essay explores competing Indian perspectives on: where is the best site of elder care: the family, the market, the state, or the individual? The aim is not only to illuminate important values, practices and policies being contested and fashioned in India today, but also to subject ostensibly a-cultural international models of old age security to cross-cultural scrutiny.

Rethinking the Generation Gap: Age and Agency in Middle-Class Kolkata

The popular and scholarly generation gap idiom implies that social change is instigated by the young while the old remain fixed in time and culture. In fact, it is inadequate to think of the young as the primary locus of social change. By examining the lives of older Indians from Kolkata who moved out of extended family homes and into elder residences and nuclear-family-style apartments, I learned that prevalent models of generation and social change fail to capture the complexity of the lives and perspectives of the older generation and the workings of social-cultural transformation.

Generation in Anthropology

Generation has been a productive lens through which to study many facets of social–cultural life in anthropology. The concept of generation has been used by anthropologists to explain social change over time, to examine the ways people organize and envision intergenerational ties within the family, to explore principles of social organization beyond the family, and to identify differences among members of a society.

Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India

Gender inequality remains both a pressing social issue and a fruitful area of social science research. This edited volume seeks to examine gender inequality and the production of well-being in Europe from an interdisciplinary perspective that is perhaps more feminist economics than sociology. The chapters draw on historical and contemporary European examples and offer a somewhat different take (both theoretically and methodologically) on what is usually found in American sociology journals. This book takes a broader view on gender inequalities and the production of wellbeing, with the ‘‘capability approach’’ serving as the theoretical connection between the chapters. The chapters reemphasize that social reproduction is more complex than the production of goods. The various authors also call for and (in the empirical chapters) take into account the socio-political and economic context. An entire chapter is dedicated to the introduction of the capability approach (Chapter Two). But the description of the theory remains lacking amidst numerous references that point the reader towards clarification elsewhere. The authors posit that well-being is an important outcome, and that the production of well-being itself needs to be included in the study of gender inequality (Chapter One), while also demanding that women are not just another vulnerable group (Chapter Four). Chapter Three further challenges conventional notions about the evolution of the ‘‘modern family’’ in the wake of the industrialization process, and argues that the fragility of families is not a novel concept. These theoretical chapters call for a more multidimensional assessment of gender inequality, and remind readers of the importance of the concept and production of well-being. The topics covered in the two empirical parts of the book are very diverse in terms of subject, methodology, and historical time period. The first empirical section ‘‘Gender Care and Work’’ is held together by the challenge to the idea of women as passive victims and in need of assistance. Chapter Five demonstrates widows’ relative economic independence in urban Sweden and Finland from 1890 to 1910, and Chapter Six shows the centrality of female relatives in caring for extended family members in times of crisis. Chapter Seven reaffirms the idea that intergenerational support is not one-sided, and those often thought of as needing care due to older age are also givers of care and other forms of support. The findings from the chapters emphasize the importance of non-monetary transfers outside the market system. The theme of caregiving is readdressed in later chapters which illustrate how home caregiving in Belgium is situated between the public/market divide (Chapter Nine) and the problems of combining market work with caregiving, especially for those in the ‘‘sandwich generation’’ (Chapter Ten). In a seeming departure from studies in the capability approach tradition, Chapter Eight is a more typical time-use study that examines the gender asymmetry in unpaid labor in Italy. The results are not novel as women are found to do more unpaid work, especially in couples with children. The second empirical part of the book focuses on the intra-household allocation of resources. Three of the five chapters in this section center primarily on the nineteenth century, examining consumption patterns in Spain (Chapter 11), gender differences in children’s schooling in Switzerland (Chapter 12), and the differences in the treatment of and opportunities for celibate men and women in the Pyrenees (Chapter 13). These chapters illustrate gender differences, but not in