| dc.description.abstract | role opportunities for the elderly.
The contemporary context for age includes a sociodemographic
profile of the Samia, Samia kinship as an exchange
system, and changing life course patterns of females and
males. Within this socio-cultural-historical framework,
definitions of "old" and attitudes toward old age and old
people are described. A socioeconomic profile of elderly
Samia, their needs and structures of support available to
them in a "lifeterm social arena" (Moore 1978) are described
illterms of gender and age cohort differences. Old people's
subjective assessments of their lives and wellbeing are
p1:eseilted.
Individual lives appear anecdotally within chapters but
especially in between-chapter "interludes" and a "postlude."
These are descriptive, impressionistic, subjective and, at
the same time, examples of common experiences of aging and
attitudes of Samia people, young and old, toward old age, old
people and social change.
Finally, policy and program recommendations and
suggestions for further research focusing on Kenyan (and
African) old people within the extended family are discussed.
This dissertation reports on a two-year field study
(1983-1985) of aging and old people among rural Samia, a
Luyia subgroup in western Kenya. The research aimed to
identify and describe Samia old people's sources of wellbeing
under conditions of socioeconomic and cultural change.
Several dimensions of wellbeing were investigated: social,
economic, physical, subjective. Research focuses included
gender differences, intergenerational relationships, and
changing life course patterns.
The research, designed within the anthropological
tradition of descriptive ethnography, used participant
observation, including many informal and topically focused
interviews, as its core method. The major formal instrument,
developed in the field, was a questionnaire administered to
416 old women and men in four sublocations of Samia.
Theoretical orientations include moderni=ation theory
(Cowgill and Holmes 1972); exchange theory,
- particularly Caldwell's (1982) concept of lifetime intergenerational
exchange; and a life course perspective (Riley 1979).
Historical and cultural contexts are described from a
cultural dynamics perspective (Herskovits 1958). Interview
data and published materials are used to reconstruct the
precolonial cultural matrix and its transformations under the | en |
