No Aging in India- Lawrence Cohen

In the chapters that follow, discussions of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century European cultural history come perilously close to readings of American supermarket tabloids and ethnographic descriptions of American support groups for Alzheimer's disease caregivers; these in turn are inserted into a text that focuses on several neighborhoods in one north Indian city but that includes discussions of an Italian pharmaceutical house in Bombay, a government ministry in New Delhi, an old age home in Calcutta, and geriatric clinics in Madras and Dehradun. Contemporary journalism rubs shoulders with Sanskrit epics and folklore, Hindi films and magazine ads, sociological anthologies, and religious calendar art. The author's two grandmothers make their appearance.
There is method to all this, and some constructive models in social theory. I will not belabor these here-- each juxtaposition must stand on its own-- save to make a few points relebant to this particular project. Field sites- to use the term anthropologists give to the places about which they write-- are plural. Each of the people I will invoke and remember below is located in terms of multiple sites: brain, body, psyche, family, household, neighborhood, religion, caste, ethnicity, class, sex, language, episteme, city, nation, world system, and so forth. These sites articulate with one another in various ways-- stable and shifting-- in time and space. I juxtapose variant classes of disparate material in different portions of this text to highlight one or another of these articulations and some of the political and interpretative issues at stake in each case. this method leads to a book that is far from Aristotelian in the sorts of unities it offers. Unlike the conventional sociology and anthropology of India, it is not quite "about India". Nor is it really a comparison, for in at least one strong sense there is no place called "the West" out there with whcih "India" can be compared. A genealogy of contemporary gerontological practice in India, for example, must draw upon the specifics of a European history of medical practice as opposed to reifying the latter yet again as a sort of black box called "Western medicine". It must ask what is at stake in the construction of a postcolonial social science around the figure of an old body, and in so doing turn to the governmental, nongovernmental, and commercial sites where such a science takes shape. It must take seriously the multiple and interlocking worlds of meaning and instituions of social regulation within which a body becomes a series of subjects over time. Such a porject requires an examination of many sites of cultural production, from changing readings of Brahmanic and anti-Brahmanic Hindu texts to different sorts of emerging urban spaces and the social dramas they frame to images and understangings incited by advertising. It must be a response to a world ever more global and yet trenchantly and often tragically ever more local in the ways poverty, violence, disease and toehr viscerally real effects of marginal subjectivity are imported, isolated, and maintained within ever less porous borders.
So, the book is about senility, dementia, hot brain, sixtyishness, Alzheimer's disease, dotage, weakness, enchantment, and other states not named but which might strike one who is familiar with one or another of these formerly used terms as being recognizable. That is, it is about the language of behavioural inapporpriateness and the poactices of exclusion that come to encompass the lived experience of many old people. It is about the structures- bodies, generations, households, neighborhoods, neurons, classes, and cultures--that mediate and sustain the relationship between experience, significance, and practice. It is ultimately about the differences between bodies that explode efforts to ground an analysis in any of these frames-- biological, political, or cultural-- without rethinking the relationships between them.