A01=Lawrence Cohen
aging
alzheimers
anxiety
asian studies
Author_Lawrence Cohen
banaras
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSP4
Category=JHM
dementia
elder care
elderly
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
family relationships
fishermen
fishing
geriatric
gerontology
identity
india
insanity
loneliness
madness
madwomen
medical anthropology
medicine
memory
menopause
mental health
mind and body
modern families
nature
nonfiction
old age
postcolonial
psychoanalysis
psychology
redemption
retirement
senility
senior citizens
varanasi
Product details
- ISBN 9780520224629
- Weight: 635g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Jan 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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From the opening sequence, in which mid-nineteenth-century Indian fishermen hear the possibility of redemption in an old woman's madness, "No Aging in India" captures the reader with its interplay of story and analysis. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic work, Lawrence Cohen links a detailed investigation of mind and body in old age in four neighborhoods of the Indian city of Varanasi (Banaras) with events and processes around India and around the world. This compelling exploration of senility - encompassing not only the aging body but also larger cultural anxieties - combines insights from medical anthropology, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. Bridging literary genres as well as geographic spaces, Cohen responds to what he sees as the impoverishment of both North American and Indian gerontologies - the one mired in ambivalence toward demented old bodies, the other insistent on a dubious morality tale of modern families breaking up and abandoning their elderly. He shifts our attention irresistibly toward how old age comes to matter in the constitution of societies and their narratives of identity and history.
Lawrence Cohen is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Critical Studies of Medicine, Science, and the Body at the University of California, Berkeley.
