ABSTRACT
This chapter explores cultural assumptions of the life-course model and the corresponding assumptions made in behavioral and social scientific research on the life course. It examines time as a set of phenomena and how these phenomena are appropriate for the study of aging and lives. The chapter looks at the issue of how time is measured and the cultural knowledge that is the foundation of chronological age. It explores how time and age are used to create age norms and life stages, which themselves are further subject to cultural interpretation and variation. Clearly good health and quality of life call for cultural interpretation. The life course as a cultural construct makes good intuitive sense for late-modern capitalist societies. The intricacies of time as expressed in age/period/cohort or in life/social/historical time all point to the enormous job of understanding the life course scientifically in a single culture, let alone across multiple cultures.
