Associate Professor Lawrence Cohen

Departments of Anthropology and of South & Southeast Asian Studies

As a cultural anthropologist, Dr. Cohen has studied how the concept of "old age" and its relation to medicine and to social institutions, as understood by both experts and laypersons, can differ across nation, culture, gender, and class. As a scholar of South Asia, he has focused on comparative work between India and the United States. As a medical anthropologist with an interest in neurology and psychiatry, he has focused on the understanding and treatment of behavioral change in old age, and in particular on what are medically understood as the senile dementias. His primary work in this field has been a 1998 book, No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, The Bad Family, and Other Modern Things (University of California Press), published in India by Oxford with a different subtitle: Modernity, Senility, and the Family. The book has won the Victor Turner Prize, the American Ethnological Society First Book Prize, and the Staley Prize.

With fellow anthropologist Annette Leibing of McGill University, Dr. Cohen is currently editing a book on recent anthropological studies of the treatment of dementia worldwide.

In his current research on the politics of surgery and planned development in the post-colonial world, Dr. Cohen has primarily focused, along with his colleague Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes, on the traffic in human body parts for transplantation, but he has begun to study the treatment of cataracts by mass surgical assembly-line camps in much of the world, and why the provision of these operations to the elderly poor through such camps has become a defining feature of civil society in much of the world.