ABSTRACT

This chapter outlines some results that obtained from program of research on the psychological characteristics of older men undertaken in a variety of mainly preliterate societies. It describes the mastery stages, as well as the recurrent ways in which they register themselves in the content of fantasy and in the forms of thought, across cultures which themselves maintain differing conventions about these matters. Cross-cultural comparative work aimed at testing developmental conceptions called for variation in study sites but also for continuity of instruments and procedures across sites. The studies which led to initial formulation of the mastery typology were undertaken as part of the Kansas City Studies of Adult Life, of the Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago. Mastery orientations that distribute more predictably by age than by culture can be regarded as developmental bench-marks, attributes of the human life cycle, and not as cultural styles that discriminate among the generations within societies.