Lawrence Cohen

My research, at the intersection of political and medical anthropology, has worked across disparate problem-spaces:

On the transnationally variable emergence of dementia as a moral and clinical site and on the enactment of “family” as central to decolonizing social sciences over the twentieth century (see for example my book No Aging in India, “Toward an Anthropology of Senility,” and “Aging in California”);

On the trope of irony as a way to reconceive the possibilities and limits of care, relation, and the narratable self in the context of dementia (see for example “Senility and Irony’s Age” or the introduction to my book with Annette Leibing, Thinking about Dementia);

On old age as a ground for the figuration of modern biopolitics (see for example “Old Woman”);

On efforts to address United States and white dominance in the transnational imagination of AIDS prevention through “cultural” models of sex and of language (see for example “The Kothi Wars”);

On the dense male homosociality of “the feudal” in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in north India as a mode of imagining political pasts and futures, through a focus on sexualized violence (see for example “Holi in Banaras,” “What Mrs Besahara Saw,” “Lucknow Noir,” “Science, Politics, and Dancing Boys,” and “Love and the Little Line”);

On masculinity and class aspiration, in contemporary north India, with a focus on the dreamworlds of cinema and fashion as sites of pleasure and danger (see for example “Style” and “Song for Pushkin”);

On the imagination of the clinic in Hindi-Urdu cinema (see for example “Foreign Operations”);

On the history of medical anthropology as a neocolonial formation (see for example “Making Peasants Protestant”);

On the intersection of elite and popular identifications with and emergent markets for national medicines and in particular Ayurveda (see for example “The Epistemological Carnival”);

On the promise of “selling a kidney” in projects of imagined repair to family life on the economic and social margin, in urban north India, and on shifting norms and forms of regulating the movement of transplant organs and tissues, nationally and transnationally, in relation to transformations in media, capital, and racialization (see for example “Where It Hurts,” “The Other Kidney,” and “Migrant Supplementarity”);

On the surgical operation as a political form in the context of twentieth-century decolonization and development (see for example “Operability,” “Operability, Bioavailability, and Exception,” and “Accusations of Illiteracy and the Medicine of the Organ”);

On the emergence of surveillance and platform capitalism in remaking the grounds of life and politics in contemporary India, with a focus on the Aadhaar biometric identity and what
happens in turn when engineers briefly capture the state and then authoritarian ethnonationalism captures the engineers (see for example, “The Social De-duplicated,” “The Nation, De-duplicated,” “Duplicate Leak Deity,” “Duplicate,” “Aadhaar and the End of Sociology,” and my (early) blogposts on Follow UIDAI);

On the shifting anthropological and biopolitical exploitation of transgendered and non-binary forms of life, struggle, and care (see for example the early essay “The Pleasures of Castration”
and the more recent “A Good Death”);

On pandemic worlds, in relation to covid and its governance, in both North America and India (see for example “The Culling,” “The Colors of Rot,” and “Superimposition”);

On the beauty and political vision of the late Oliver Sacks (see for example “Oliver’s Body” and “The Community, the Clinic, and the Road not Taken”);

On the object of religious devotion, divinity not as a person but as a relation, with a focus on god Ganesh and his relation to female divinities (see “The Wives of Ganesa”);

On law, risk, tort, and their mediation (see “Reflections on Risk, Media, and the Reasonable Animated by a Trial by Jury”);

And on all of these things, entangled, and on the practice and limits of writing, of teaching, and of anthropology as a perverse mode of ethical work in the world (see for example, “M’s Book,” “The Gay Guru,” and “Ethical Publicity” ).