ABSTRACT
Enough has been written by anthropologists to indicate that the status of the aged varies greatly from society to society. Some familiar examples come to mind. The Siriono of the Bolivian highlands, like many nomadic hunters and gatherers, abandoned their aged and infirm without ceremony (Holmberg 1950). Similarly, certain inland Eskimo groups abandoned their old and sick, though this practice may not have been so widespread among the Eskimo as might be believed (Hughes 1961). The Chinese, on the other hand, venerated their aged, who were after all but one step removed from the guardians of the hearth, the ancestors. The Li Chi, or Book of Ritual, one of the classics of Chinese literature which political and social aspirants were required to learn, deals mostly with the care of the aged. And indeed, respect for the aged was so deeply ingrained in the Chinese that Gray (1878, p. 239) describes a law which, in the case of parricide, “expressly declares that not only shall the offender be subjected to a lingering death, but that the schoolmaster who instructed him in his youth shall be decapitated, and that the bones of his grandfathers shall be exhumed and scattered to the winds.” Simmons’ volume (1945), although methodologically faulty, suggests some of the determinants of the treatment of the aged. Case studies of how the aged fare abound (e.g., Arth 1965; Holmberg 1961; Shelton 1965; Smith 1961; Spencer 1965).
