Interpreting senility: cross-cultural perspectives.

In general, senility in American society is seen through the lens of biomedicine and conceptualized in terms of physical changes in the person. Research on attitudes about senility in other cultures shows that this is not the only way to conceptualize cognitive change in later life. This article explores cultural aspects related to cognitive change in old age by focusing on ethnographic examples from Japan. I argue that in Japan the social concepts related to defining the person are emphasized when thinking about cognitive change in later life, rather than biomedical concepts associated with pathologies of the brain. In part because of this focus, for older Japanese senility is often viewed as being a moral category as much as a category of disease.