ABSTRACT
Age and aging, kinship, and generational shift are human universals, but they are played out in a great diversity of local forms, which makes it hard—some would say impossible—to distinguish between what is specific to a certain time or place from what is generally true. Possible or not, a key ambition of the social sciences is to search below the complexities of the observable to some general and less complex order. One avenue to such knowledge is through comparative studies, be they comparative across time, place, or any other dimension.
