Abstract

There is a debate in the scholarly literature over whether the elderly enjoy better life satisfaction in nonindustrialized than in industrialized societies, and whether aging perceptions are better in nonindustrialized societies, too. This chapter describes our attempts to contribute to that debate by conducting a series of quantitative studies on the subjective wellbeing of the elderly and attitudes toward aging in various nonindustrialized indigenous societies, some of which involved a direct comparison with an industrialized society. Our results show that at least some nonindustrialized societies do in fact demonstrate better attitudes toward aging and that the elderly in those societies do seem to be happier than in industrialized countries. They also show that, in line with some theories proposed in scholarly literature, better aging perceptions in nonindustrialized societies seem to depend in part on lower levels of urbanization and literacy, but that, contrary to some other theories, they do not depend on the frequency of direct personal contact with the elderly. Finally, our results have some general implications for the comparative study of aging perceptions between nonindustrialized and industrialized societies as such, as they suggest that there are crucial differences in how these two kinds of societies conceive old age and aging in the first place.