The Anthropology of Longevity: Cultural Meanings of Aging, Purpose and Belonging

This thesis investigates the non-biological determinants of exceptional longevity by examining how cultural concepts of purpose and belonging are generated, sustained, and experienced in later life within "Blue Zone" communities. While contemporary public health and biomedical research extensively document the lifestyle, dietary, and genetic profiles of these regions, they consistently reduce longevity to an individual, medicalized project. This biological reductionism obscures the social infrastructures that mandate elder participation and recognition. Drawing on Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology and Jack Sidnell's ethnomethodological approach to intersubjectivity, this study reorients longevity as a relational accomplishment rather than an individual trajectory. Using a qualitative, comparative meta-ethnographic analysis of five global Blue Zones (Okinawa, Sardinia, Nicoya, Ikaria, and Loma Linda) this project maps the interactional mechanisms through which meaningful aging is produced moment-by-moment in everyday social life. To bridge anthropological observation with sociological causality, this research integrates Social Network Analysis (SNA) and the "Mattering" Hypothesis. It demonstrates that behaviors contributing to healthspan are network properties characterized by high structural density and functional specificity, which prevent the "social death" common in Western institutionalized care. By maintaining high network centrality, Blue Zone elders experience an existential validation that acts as a primary biological regulator. This research establishes a psychoneuroimmunological bridge showing how the cultural worldview of purpose (ikigai or Plan de Vida) translates into a physiological buffer that elevates vagal tone, increases heart rate variability, and mitigates the cellular "weathering" and allostatic overload induced by chronic social isolation. Crucially, this thesis grapples with the historical legacy of functionalist analysis in anthropology. Rather than employing a naive, static functionalism, this study adopts a critical, neo-functionalist framework to defend the social body against neoliberal health optimization models, while remaining attentive to structural inequalities and the hidden costs of care. It exposes how the density of these supportive networks often relies heavily on the unequal extraction of gendered, affective labor from younger women within the community. Ultimately, this study concludes that the modern aging crisis is fundamentally an intersubjective, rather than a biomedical, catastrophe. Resolving it demands a radical re-envisioning of social policy, built environments, and care systems to foster a world where personhood is collectively sustained and every individual inherently matters.