抄録
Age misstatement, presumably derived from the lack of a tradition of reckoning age by single years at the last birthday, is a notorious problem in obtaining correct age data by house-to-house canvassing in rural Java. Given this situation, I attempted in the course of ecology-oriented fieldwork to estimate ages at a Priangan-Sundanese village by a variety of means. This paper presents firstly a brief analysis of the age data collected directly from the inhabitants, which shows that their age reporting is so strongly biased that age data based solely thereon could be detrimental to demographic and biosocial studies. I then describe my attempt to obtain age estimates and some of the difficulties encountered in the field. Individuals' ages were estimated by a combination of the usual techniques,i.e., locating a person's “private event” with a “public event” of established year of occurrence, checking a person's age rank against those of a number of neighbors, and seeking the Gregorian date of birth in the Islamic-Gregorian calendrical conversion table by making full use of the traditional practice of expressing birthday in terms of Islamic month, date, day of the week, etc. Although each technique used has some weak points, their combination may provide reasonable, if not precise, estimates of age. Since my fieldwork is still in progress, the results of the age estimation will be reported elsewhere.
