ABSTRACT
A central concern for sociologists of the life course is the analysis of the duality between individual change and development and positions occupied in social structure; a duality resulting in observable temporal organization of individual lives. This duality is not constant across different societies, nor is it transparent to analysis. Anthropologists provide evidence for considerable variation in the organization of the life course. There are societies with sharply marked age-graded transitions among very different statuses and roles, and other examples of societies where only a few age-dependent differences are noted and most transitions are considered gradual and without major consequences. Providing explanations for such differences are important tasks for theory and research. These are also difficult tasks and most research does not go beyond descriptions of observed differences in life-course organization.
