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Taming Oblivion examines the cultural construction of senility in Japan and the moral implications of dependent behavior for older Japanese. While the biomedical construction of senility-as-pathology has become increasingly the norm in North America, in Japan a folk category of senility exists known as boke. Although symptomatically and conceptually overlapping with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of senile dementia, boke is distinguished from unambiguously pathological conditions. Rather than being viewed as a disease, boke is seen as an illness over which people have some degree of control. John Traphagan's ethnographic study of older Japanese explores their experiences as they contemplate and attempt to prevent or delay the boke condition.
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John W. Traphagan is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and also Secretary General of the Japan Anthropology Workshop. He is the author of
Taming Oblivion: Aging Bodies and the Fear of Senility in Japan and the coeditor of
Imagined Families, Lived Families: Culture and Kinship in Contemporary Japan (with Akiko Hashimoto);
Wearing Cultural Styles in Japan: Concepts of Tradition and Modernity in Practice (with Christopher S. Thompson); and
Demographic Change and the Family in Japan's Aging Society (with John Knight), all published by SUNY Press.
