Book Review 
 
Review of Shea, Jeanne, Katrina Moore and Hong Zhang, 

eds. Beyond Filial Piety: Rethinking Aging and Caregiving 
in Contemporary East Asian Societies. New York, NY: 
Berghahn. 2020. pp. 432. Price: $149.00 (Hardcopy); 

$39.95 (eBook). 

 

Francesco Diodati 

University of Milan-Bicocca                                                                                                                            
f.diodati@campus.unimib.it 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anthropology & Aging, Vol 42, No 1 (2021), pp.161-163 

ISSN 2374-2267 (online) DOI 10.5195/aa.2021.342 

 

  

 

 
 

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 

 
This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as 

part of its 

D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. 

mailto:f.diodati@campus.unimib.it


           Book Review | Diodati |  

  

 

Anthropology & Aging  

Vol 42 No 1 (2021) ISSN 2374-2267 (online) DOI 10.5195/aa.2021.342 http://anthro-age.pitt.edu 

161 

 

 
 
Book Review 
 
Review of Shea, Jeanne, Katrina Moore and Hong Zhang, 
eds. Beyond Filial Piety: Rethinking Aging and Caregiving 

in Contemporary East Asian Societies. New York, NY: 
Berghahn. 2020. pp. 432. Price: $149.00 (Hardcopy); 

$39.95 (eBook). 
 

Francesco Diodati 

University of Milan-Bicocca                                                                                                                            
f.diodati@campus.unimib.it 

 

 

 

Jeanne Shea, Katrina Moore, and Hong Zhang’s edited volume, Beyond Filial Piety: Rethinking Aging and 

Caregiving in Contemporary East Asian Societies, brings together qualitative studies that address the social 

and cultural transformations of aging and caregiving in East Asia. As the editors state in the 

introduction, traditional Confucian ideas of filial piety that prescribe adult children to fulfill their 

obligations to respect, obey and care for their elderly parents have become increasingly more difficult 

to put into practice, given the unprecedented acceleration of population aging in East Asian societies 

(1).  

 

This volume engages in a constant dialogue with Charlotte Ikels’s (2004), Filial Piety: Practice and 

Discourse in Contemporary East Asia. Shea, Moore, and Zhang discern important continuities with the 

findings in Ikels’s volume about the ways in which, in this geographical area, demographic change and 

welfare transformations continue to affect care practices and support for the aged as well as challenge 

the understandings of filial piety and obligations toward old age within communities, families, and 

individuals (2). However, the editors also note that a decade and a half after Ikels’s collection, “much 

has changed in demographic, social, and public policy terms” (2). With respect to the demographic 

transition of Western Countries from aged (14 % elderly) to super aging societies (21 % elderly), that of 

East Asia has increased even more rapidly (17). In response to this demographic trend, the editors aim 

to update relevant ethnographic material by including geographic locations such as Hong Kong, 

Taiwan, and Singapore, in addition to China, South Korea, and Japan. The contemporary socio-

demographic reality additionally necessitates the editors to give proportional scholarly attention to 

research that deals with care for and by the aged “whether for themselves, their spouses, or their children 

or grandchildren” (6). Moreover, increasing possibilities for nonfamilial options of eldercare, both 

government and market driven, also need to be considered because they impact the practice and 

imaginary of good care and aging (6). The present collection expands Ikels’s (2004) work into a new 

research area that combines more geographic locations and recent changes in terms of practices and 

values toward aging and caregiving in East Asian societies.  

 

Methodologically, the book engages with aging and caregiving through mixed methods and 

ethnographic approaches to provide additional qualitative data to the massive research conducted on a 

macro-demographic or policy level (10). The authors in this volume are concerned with bringing 

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Vol 42 No 1 (2021) ISSN 2374-2267 (online) DOI 10.5195/aa.2021.342 http://anthro-age.pitt.edu 

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together the macro-level of demographic changes with the micro-level of everyday lived experiences 

which are documented through participant observation, interviews, and popular and media 

representations. The theoretical frameworks adopted throughout the chapters include classical 

anthropological and sociological perspectives of interpretivism, critical theory, globalization theory, 

and social constructivism. The volume also incorporates approaches from social gerontology, such as 

the life-course perspective, age-stratification theory, and exchange theory (10-11). Additionally, some 

research draws on feminist approaches to show how many contemporary East Asian societies are 

increasingly moving toward gender equity and neutrality (e.g., Chapters 2 and 3). This methodological 

and theoretical orientation allows for a very dynamic and textured account of aging and caregiving 

from differently situated perspectives (e.g., caregivers, cared-for, health practitioners, grandparents, 

spouses, children, grandchildren, migrant workers, transnational families, and communities), 

oscillating between individual biographies and molecular accounts of family and community life and 

social structures and policy-making processes. 

 

The book is divided into three macro sections according to specific cultural areas, but all the parts 

describe socio-cultural contexts rooted in Confucian traditions of filial piety. Part I, “Aging and 

caregiving in Chinese Contexts” (Chapters 1-6) engages with aging and caregiving in China. This part 

includes Youcai Tang and Jeanne Shea’s exploration of the “Jianxiang Model”: an experiment in 

community-based care for seniors to solve the problems of old-age support in rural areas (Chapter 1). 

In these areas, which have the highest proportions of senior citizens and the lowest levels of economic 

prosperity, the “model of Jiangxiang” succeeded in reviving collective agriculture and establishing free 

senior cohousing to provide material support and care for elderly people. These programs also achieved 

higher levels of life-satisfaction in the elderly population and fostered positive bonds between adult 

children and their aged parents, precisely because they went beyond ideas about seniors’ dependency 

and filial co-residence that were declining anyway (64). Leng Leng Thang and Kalyani Mehta (Chapter 

5) share the results of a study on grandchildren’s perceptions of caring for grandparents. Their chapter 

starts with the description of a controversial state-sponsored film about filial piety in Singapore. The 

film was meant to restore feelings of filial piety in Singapore’s next generations by narrating the story 

of a son watching his father who tenderly cared for his grandmother affected by dementia (142-143). 

Thang and Mehta illuminate how many young people in Singapore demand the government to take on 

more responsibility when it comes to elder care programs. They still see filial piety as an aspiration, but 

face their limits in fulfilling it due to a heavy workload, hefty medical costs, and high costs of living 

(Chapter 5).  

 

In Part II, “Aging and Caregiving in Japanese Contexts” (Chapters 7-9), Susan Long and Ruth Campbell 

examine the changes in the meanings of family caregiving in Japan after the establishment of the 

national long-term insurance care (LTC) system (Chapter 9). The two researchers criticize biomedical 

notions of caregiving burden and advocate for a conceptualization of caregiving that embraces 

variations over different stages and historical changes in cultural ideas about care (242-243). The 

“caregiving career” concept allows them to explore the meanings contemporary Japanese family 

caregivers give to care activities in relation to the illness trajectory, including how caregiving still 

continues after the death of the people cared-for (243). Finally, Part III is dedicated to Korean contexts 

(Chapters 10-12). In Chapter 10, Hyun Ji Lee and Kyong Hee Chee state that the institutionalization of 

eldercare through the LTC national program has effectively changed the idea of filial piety. Many 

caregivers declare no longer feeling guilty after having entrusted elderly family members to a nursing 

home, as the number of LTC facilities has increased nowadays. The authors also report that many family 

members believe that trained and certified LTC workers may provide better care than them. Chapter 11 

focuses on a group of South Korean seniors who were repatriated from Sakhalin Island, where they 

were sent to serve as laborers during the Japanese occupation of Korea in the 1930s and early 1940s, and 

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           Book Review | Diodati |  

  

 

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Vol 42 No 1 (2021) ISSN 2374-2267 (online) DOI 10.5195/aa.2021.342 http://anthro-age.pitt.edu 

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then retained after the island came under Russian control. In this chapter, Dorota Szawarska examines 

the intergenerational and family tensions brought by repatriation programs as well as the 

discriminatory behaviors directed toward Sakhalin elderly migrants. The ambivalence of caregiving 

and filial piety are well exposed in her work, as she deals with the dynamic conflict of being responsible 

for caring for parents and children at the same time. 

 

This volume is an extensive collection of ethnographies and qualitative studies. As the editors note in 

the conclusion, there are certain limitations to the book’s content; the studies were not able to 

acknowledge the transformations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and do not address the full range 

of diversity within the contexts examined. This includes care and aging among LGBTQI and minority 

groups (387). However, the collection successfully challenges the popular and academic 

romanticization of filial piety and caregiving in the East (Buch 2015; Sivaramakrishnan 2018) and also 

contributes to revealing the ways in which elders, families, and communities can reimagine traditional 

cultural values and actively respond to population aging. For this reason, I would recommend it to 

students, researchers, and practitioners in many fields, including East Asian studies, social research on 

kinship and caregiving, anthropology of morality and ethics, anthropology, and gerontology. 
 

References  

Buch, Elana D. 2015. "Anthropology of Aging and Care." Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 277-293. 

Ikels, Charlotte, ed. 2004. Filial Piety: Practice and Discourse in Contemporary East Asia. 1st edition. Stanford, Calif: 

Stanford University Press. 

Sivaramakrishnan, Kavita. 2018. As the World Ages: Rethinking a Demographic Crisis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: 

Harvard University Press. 

 

 

 
 

http://anthro-age.pitt.edu/