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Preface As I move into my seventies and retirement from my academic position looms, it has been both a time of introspection mixed with “OK, what comes next?” It is amazing to think that it is 30 years since the first edition of the Cultural Context of Aging was published. Over this time there has been an emergence of a truly expansive anthropology of aging. Over these three decades there has been a monumental growth of interest in global aging as it has begun to impact all parts of our planet and has drawn the attention of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and increasingly the national bureaucracies of nations including Mexico, Ghana, Thailand, and China. Previously, in those countries government officials and citizens would have been insulted by outsiders questioning if their family systems were up to dealing with older persons in their borders. As seen in the chapters deal- ing with these countries, this has radically changed through the imperative of globalization, increased longevity, and reductions in fertility rates. New to the Fourth Edition Increasingly, the subject of aging and late life has appropriately been cou- pled with broad concerns of globalization, transnational migration, the life course, gender diversity, ethnicity, community organization, and new under- standings of disability. All of these topics are reflected in this volume. I have continued a focus on three themes of culture spaces, cultural scripts, and elderscapes, and more than ever these ideas resonate in the book’s chapters. More than half the chapters represent new, original research and touch on more varied places than previously, such as Ghana, Thailand, Romania, Denmark, and Tanzania. Also included are new topics such as successful aging, robotics, gender diversity, ethnic resistance to toxic environments, and new perspectives on disability, eldersourcing, cemeteries as ancestral landscapes of culture, and technologies for “aging in place.” Throughout the