Elusive Adulthoods examines why, within the past decade, complaints about an inability to achieve adulthood have been heard around the world. By exploring the changing meaning of adulthood in Botswana, China, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States, contributors to this volume pose the problem of "What is adulthood?" and examine how the field of anthropology has come to overlook this meaningful stage in its studies. Through these case studies we discover different means of recognizing the achievement of adulthood, such as through negotiated relationships with others, including grown children, and as a form of upward class mobility. We also encounter the difficulties that come from a sense of having missed full adulthood, instead jumping directly into old age in the course of rapid social change, or a reluctance to embrace the stability of adulthood and necessary subordination to job and family. In all cases, the contributors demonstrate how changing political and economic factors form the background for generational experience and understanding of adulthood, which is a major focus of concern for people around the globe as they negotiate changing ways of living.

Elusive Adulthoods examines why, within the past decade, complaints about an inability to achieve adulthood have been heard around the world. By exploring the changing meaning of adulthood in Botswana, China, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States, contributors to this volume pose the problem of "What is adulthood?" and examine how the field of anthropology has come to overlook this meaningful stage in its studies. Through these case studies we discover different means of recognizing the achievement of adulthood, such as through negotiated relationships with others, including grown children, and as a form of upward class mobility. We also encounter the difficulties that come from a sense of having missed full adulthood, instead jumping directly into old age in the course of rapid social change, or a reluctance to embrace the stability of adulthood and necessary subordination to job and family. In all cases, the contributors demonstrate how changing political and economic factors form the background for generational experience and understanding of adulthood, which is a major focus of concern for people around the globe as they negotiate changing ways of living.

The "meantime" represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of "the possible" where calculation coexists with uncertainty, promises with disappointment, and imminence with deferral. Attending to the temporalities of emerging rather than settled facts, they put the stress on the temporal tactics, social commitments, material connections, dispositional orientations, and affective circuits that emerge in the meantime even in the most desperate times.

"This volume illuminates how families and the communities in which they are enmeshed negotiate everyday lives with the social, cultural, economic, and political resources available to them. It provides an excellent example of how anthropology matters to our understanding of the contemporary world and its global restructuring." Karen Tranberg Hansen, Northwestern University

Globalization is not only a large-scale phenomenon: it is also inextricably bound up with intimate aspects of personhood, care, and the daily decisions through which we make our lives. Looking at sub-Saharan Africa, Madagascar, Mexico, the U.S., Europe, India, and China, Generations and Globalization investigates the impact of globalization in the context of families, age groups, and intergenerational relations. The contributors offer an innovative approach that focuses on the changing dynamics between generations, rather than treating changes in childhood, youth, or old age as discrete categories. They argue that new economies and global flows do not just transform contemporary family life, but are in important ways shaped and constituted by it.

Contributors are Jennifer Cole, Deborah Durham, Jessica Greenberg, Sarah Lamb, Julie Livingston, Roger Magazine, Andrea Muehlebach, Martha Areli Ramirez Sanchez, and T. E. Woronov."