1. The few studies of aging include Biswas (1987); Cohen (1992, 1995, 1998); Hiebert (1981); Roy (1992 [1972]:125–48); and S. Vatuk (1975, 1980, 1987, 1990, 1992, 1995).

2. See Abu-Lughod 1991, 1993; Brightman 1995; Clifford 1986, 1988; E. V. Daniel 1996; Knauft 1996; Raheja and Gold 1994:1–29; and R. Rosaldo 1989.

3. See George Stocking (1976) for an incisive look at the growing systematicity of the culture concept during the interwar period (1921–45). David Schneider (1968, 1976) provides a particularly vivid example of the systematicity and internal coherence of culture during a somewhat later period of American cultural anthropology, asserting, for instance: “A culture is a total system; it does not have loose ends and unintegrated pieces and parts that do not articulate with other parts. It holds together as a meaningful system” (1976:219).

4. Critics of modernist approaches include Abu-Lughod (1991, 1993:6–15) and Said (1978). Appadurai (1992:35–36) has characterized this traditional vision of culture as a “mode of thought” that “incarcerates” the native in a fixed “way of thinking that admits no fuzzy boundaries and is splendid in its internal consistency” (cf. Raheja and Gold 1994:2).

5. On the increasingly fluid boundaries of culture, see Appadurai 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Hannerz 1993, 1997; and Kearney 1995.

6. Postmodern analyses of women form a vast literature, but some important works include Haraway (1990), Minh-ha (1989), Mohanty (1991), Moore (1994), Ortner (1996), Riley (1988), Joan Scott (1988), and Spelman (1988).

7. Works critical of early feminist anthropology include Haraway (1990), hooks (1984), Mohanty (1991), Ortner (1996), Rich (1986), Joan Scott (1988), and Spelman (1988).

8. Notable exceptions to the lack of interest in older women include S. Vatuk (1975, 1987, 1992, 1995), Marriott (1998), Roy (1992 [1972]:125–148), and Wadley (1994:25–29, 1995:98–99). Menon and Shweder (1998) consider Oriya Hindu women’s “mature adulthood” (what we might term “middle age”), or prauda.

9. On purdah, sexuality, etc., see, e.g., Bennett 1983; Dube 1988; Fruzzetti 1982; Jeffery, Jeffery, and Lyon 1989; and Papanek and Minault 1982.

10. I am struck by how often media reports and popular discussions (in Calcutta, Mangaldihi, and the United States) on the recent intensification of dowry (or bride) burnings in India claim without evidence that the mother-in-law is primarily responsible for the murders. If true (and more research on the question is needed), it is hard to believe that she was acting alone. For more on dowry burnings, see Ghadially and Kumar 1988; Grover 1990; Kumari 1989; Nandy 1995; Stone and James 1997; and van Willigen and Channa 1991.

11. For edited volumes exploring aging, see Amoss and Harrell 1981; Fry 1980, 1981; Kerns and Brown 1992; Kertzer and Keith 1984; Myerhoff 1992; Myerhoff and Simic 1978; and Sokolovsky 1989. For book-length works, see Cohen 1998; Counts and Counts 1996; Hazan 1994; Kaufman 1986; Keith 1977; Lock 1993; Myerhoff 1979; Plath 1980; Rasmussen 1997; and Vesperi 1985. For reviews of much of this material, see Cohen 1994 and Keith 1980. For a related edited volume on middle age, see Shweder 1998.

12. Exceptions to the tendency to compartmentalize studies of the old are most common in research on societies where age stratification is a highly marked dimension of social organization. Anthropologists studying such societies in Africa and central Brazil have often brought analyses of age to a societal level (see, e.g., Maybury-Lewis 1979; La Fontaine 1978; Spencer 1976; T. Turner 1979; M. Wilson 1963). Hugh-Jones (1988) also attempts to integrate her analysis of the full life cycle with analyses of other domains of sociocultural life.

13. The arguments emphasizing the specifically female body are quite varied; see, e.g., Braidotti 1991; Cixous 1981; Gallop 1988; Kristeva 1980; Rich 1976; and Suleiman 1986. For discussions of this kind of argument, see Moore (1994, esp. pp. 17–21) and Nicholson (1994).

14. On the body as gendered, see, e.g., Butler 1990, 1993; Nicholson 1994; and Joan Scott 1988, 1993.

15. Henrietta Moore’s observations (1994:33) are relevant here: “The idea of persons as divisible, partible and unbounded has now gained a certain acceptance in the discipline (see, for example, Marriott, 1976, and Strathern, 1988), but there is still considerable resistance to any suggestion that the body might not be the source of identity, or that experience (both of self and of the world) is not always possessed by or located in an interior self.”

16. On our thinking on the relationship between body, sex, and gender, see Foucault 1980a, 1980b; Lacqueur 1990; and Nicholson 1994.

17. On gender identities over the course of one’s life, see, e.g., Gutmann 1964, 1992; Hawkes, O’Connell, and Jones 1997; Kerns and Brown 1992; Poole 1981; Rasmussen 1987; and S. Vatuk 1975, 1987, 1992.

18. On negative changes in the female body, see, e.g., Beyene 1989:124; Boddy 1992; Chapkis 1986; Copper 1986; Healey 1986; and Kaufert and Lock 1992.

19. Some biological anthropologists have begun to attempt to incorporate postmenopause into evolutionary theories. Thus recent work by Hawkes, O’Connell, and Jones (1989, 1997), based on a study of the Hadza hunters and gatherers of northern Tanzania, suggests that postmenopausal women are stronger and are able to work harder than almost all others in the community, as they gather food and wood and care for grandchildren. Hawkes, O’Connell, and Jones hypothesize that there may be an evolutionary advantage to menopause, which ensures that women live long enough to help their children bear and support children (cf. R. Alexander 1974; Gaulin 1980; Lancaster and King 1992; P. Mayer 1982). This perspective marks a break from that of other evolutionary theories, which have often presented menopause as a puzzling anomaly: why would women live beyond their reproductive years, when they have ostensibly completed their service to the species?

20. For a similar look at menopause and hormone replacement therapy in Australia, see Klein and Dumble 1994.

21. See Lamb 1993:34–53 for a more detailed account of Mangaldihi’s history, political economy, and social structure.

22. In 1953, the West Bengal state government passed an estates acquisition act that aimed to abolish the zamindari system of large revenue-collecting landowners and to redistribute land to the landless (Basu and Bhattacharya 1963). The Bargadars Act of 1950, and more recent reforms in the late 1970s, also imparted rights to landless bargādārs, or sharecroppers who cultivate the land of others. Because of these reforms, Brahmans in Mangaldihi commonly state with some chagrin that the “age (yuga) of the Brahmans” has passed. Many of the village’s lower-caste families do see themselves as better off than their forebears, although most have not come near to gaining the kind of economic security that upper-caste families in the region generally enjoy.

23. In fact, there were more households of Bagdis than Brahmans (table 1). But Brahman and other higher-caste families in Mangaldihi tended to maintain larger households (remaining more often “joint”) than did lower-status and landless families. For these reasons, my census figures indicate that counted individually, Brahmans slightly outnumbered Bagdis. “Scheduled” is an official government classification of disadvantaged castes and tribes.

24. Teng (1996:143–44) makes this same point regarding the equation of “gender” with “women” in gender studies in the East Asian field.