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

by Lawrence J. Cohen

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.

Genres: Health, Anthropology, Ethnography

398 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Rahul · Rating 3 out of 5]

From what I understand, this is a highly acclaimed book. It's won several prizes and is seen as a fundamental work in ethnographic writing. And I don't doubt the authority of the author, who has spent more than a decade studying India from an ethnographic perspective. However, I fail to understand how a book that purports to advance one's understanding of a subject seems to actively be written in a confusing, disorienting, and generally impenetrable fashion. I don't doubt the presence of good ideas and conclusions in this book, but the way in they are presented is with such a degree of obfuscation and lack of clear organization that it begins to approach comedy. Anecdotes will be introduced and then referenced or continued hundreds of pages of pages later. The same conclusions are reached across different chapters. Analysis will gave way to short narratives that seem more fitting for MFA workshops. Indeed, the prose begins to resemble that of a pseudo-Faulkner. And the worst part about this stream-of-consciousness writing is that this seems to be intentional. As Cohen says in the opening chapter:

”This process has led to a book full of detail. Like the voices of some of the older people I write about here, it may seem to some to be too full, too stocked with unsolicited memories, opinions, and stories. For me, both the pleasures and the responsibilities of ethnography lie precisely in such excess, in a mode of writing and of engaging the world through continual juxtaposition and repetition.”

And while I adore flowery prose, I'm not sure what purpose it serves in an academic tome. I am unsure who would be reading this book for the literary value it seems to claim. But despite all this, it's clear to see why it's so adored. For those who take the time untangle the weeds and journey to the author's intent, there is indeed a light at the end of the tunnel. For all its faults, No Aging in India is integral in establishing that

”Alzheimer's ideology posits normal aging against total and unremitting pathology; in so doing, it both denies the complex experience and the personhood of the old persons it would represent and shifts attention away from the social origins of much of the weakness of the old.”

among many other interesting and apt conclusions from Cohen's time in India.

[Kate]

"about conceptions of madness, senility and old age in India and the United States" Sienna Craig