Culture, Health, and Social Change is the first of three volumes on Aging conceived for the International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine. Leading scholars from a range of disciplines contest some of the predominant paradigms on aging, and critically assess modern trends in social health policy. How we approach and understand "aging" will have indelible effects on existing and future elder citizens. Acknowledging the cultural variances that exist in the human experience of aging is therefore of vital importance in order to respond to individual needs in a manner that is not paternalistic, discriminatory, or exclusionary.

Paradigms.- Changing paradigms of aging and being older: An historical perspective.- Implications of aging paradigms for bioethics.- Health in the "grey" millennium: Romanticism versus complexity?.- Social Responses.- Protecting aged citizenship: Rethinking the "mutuality" of state and civil society?.- Discrimination against the elderly within a consequentialist approach to health care resource allocation.- Therapeutic jurisprudence and American elder law.- Finding the elder voice in social legislation.- European social policy for the elderly.- Aging in developing countries: A public health and human rights issue.- Cultural Dimensions.- Aging and dying in cross-cultural perspective: An introduction to a critical cross-cultural understanding of death and dying.- Old age, cultural complexity, and narrative interpretation: Building bridges in a 21st Century world of diversity.- Foodways of disadvantaged men growing old in the inner city: Policy issues from ethnographic research.- Reflections.- The affective alienation of the elderly: A humane and ethical issue.- Reflection on aging: A time to live and to share.