Noted medical anthropologist, Lawrence Cohen, will lecture May 2

"The Operation and Its Reason: Reflections on the Surgical Constitution of As-if Moderns in India" is the title of a University Lecture at Cornell to be given by Lawrence Cohen, professor of anthropology and South and Southeast Asian studies at the University of California-Berkeley.

The free, public lecture will be Friday, May 2, at 3:30 p.m. in 165 McGraw Hall.

Trained in both medicine and anthropology at Harvard University, Cohen has been an innovator in the cultural analysis of Alzheimer's disease in India and, in turn, has influenced scholars working on the cultural understanding of health and disease in South Asia and elsewhere.

His book, No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things, winner of the Victor Turner Prize for best book in Humanistic Anthropology and the First Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society, has been influential in the growing field of medical anthropology.

"He also is a leading scholar of bio-politics and bio-ethics," said Andrew Willford, Cornell assistant professor of anthropology. "His research on organ transplantations in South India has produced much discussion about the ethics of the organ industry. In addition to his specific research projects, he employs subtle psychological and psychiatric training in the reading of voice, text and public discourses. In sum, he brings culturally distinctive humanistic and scientific discourses into productive dialogue, yielding works of uncommon creativity, sensitivity and theoretical rigor."

Cornell assistant professor of anthropology Hiro Miyazaki said that aside from Cohen's obvious appeal to South Asianists and cultural anthropologists, "his work is of great interest to science and technology studies, rural sociology, law and to those interested in the interface of bio-ethics, cultural forms, gender and subjectivity."