Transitions and transformations : cultural perspectives on aging and the life course Rapid population aging once associated with only a select group of modern industrialized nations has now become a topic of increasing global concern. This volume reframes aging on a global scale by illustrating the multiple ways it is embedded within individual social and cultural life courses. Rapid population aging once associated with only a select group of modern industrialized nations has now become a topic of increasing global concern. This volume reframes aging on a global scale by illustrating the multiple ways it is embedded within individual social and cultural life courses. The volume presents a broad range of ethnographic work introducing a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to studying life course transitions in conjunction with broader sociocultural transformations. Through detailed accounts in such diverse settings as nursing homes in Sri Lanka a factory in Massachusetts cemeteries in Japan and clinics in Mexico the authors explore not simply our understandings of growing older but the interweaving of individual maturity and intergenerational relationships social and economic institutions and intimate experiences of gender identity and the body