No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things

Abstract

No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Family, and Other Modern Things. LAWRENCE COHEN. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; xxv + 367 pp. This a powerful, provocative book, rich with meaning. Lawrence Cohen weaves together challenging, revealing theory with vivid ethnographic images - of white-clad stooped women mingling with hungry dogs on the narrow lanes of Varanasi (Benaras); of a hot-minded mother-in-law yelling out her window for someone to come save her, thus inculpating a Bad Family and uncaring daughter-inlaw; of an eager anthropologist trying to find senile old people with whom to do research. By the end the reader gains a new awareness of an important dimension of social and political life in India, well of what medical anthropology, gerontology, and ethnographic writing can be. The book about age, and people comprehend the body and its behavior in time. Cohen focuses here on loss and - decay of the body, its reason, its voice, its ability to be heard a speaking subject - that is, on what may be termed senility (p. xv). As Cohen describes it, the book is rooted in a sense that our practices of thinking about society, culture, the body, and the nature of our times would benefit from a sustained attention to age a kind of difference (p. xv). Cohen does not isolate the study of old age as a singular object awaiting scholarly appropriation, then, but rather seeks to examine how age engages larger debates in and out of the academy, particularly those relevant to contemporary India and its political economy and public culture (p. xvii). Cohen writes a medical anthropologist who spent some years examining geriatric and gerontological practice in the United States a medical student before embarking on research in India. The book juxtaposes Alzheimer's and the Bad Family the contemporary master narratives of aging and debility in the United States and India respectively. When he was a kid, Cohen recalls, we used to talk about senility a vague sort of thing, and when in college, it was still possible for a professor in psychology to lecture that senility was a cognitive defense against the mindlessness of institutionalized old age. Now, Alzheimer's disease has become our dominant paradigm for explaining the losses of age. Without denying the usefulness of Alzheimer's an explanation for a certain set of behaviors, Cohen challenges us to rethink the medicalization of old age that takes place when we reduce all of the social, political, and existential complexities of aging to the plaques and tangles of a biological brain disease. He argues that Alzheimer's a disease construct has replaced old age in our structural understanding of the life course, so that old age itself can be normal and freed from decline, and debility explained via a stricken brain (p. 60). In India, contemporary master narratives frame aging not in terms of biology, but in terms of the decline of the joint family. Senility - understood locally a hot-minded, weak-brained, or 11 sixtyish state - points to a Family, transpiring when an old person does not receive familial support, service (seva), and respect. Indian gerontologists and Cohen's other informants invoke the joint family almost the sole criterion for assessing the well-being of old people. …