Sarah Lamb
Brown 208
Department of Anthropology
Brandeis University
P.O. Box 549110, MS 006
Waltham, MA 02454-9110
lamb@brandeis.edu
(781) 736-2211
AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION
Sociocultural Theory. Gender. Anthropology of Aging. Medical Anthropology. Self and Person. Migration and Transnationalism. South Asia. United States
Background and Description
Sarah Lamb, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, is a cultural anthropologist who studies the ways people construct their social-cultural worlds and identities, particularly surrounding gender, aging, the body, family, and nation. She critically investigates everyday life practices and experiences, medical and legal discourses, and taken-for-granted assumptions, as a means to understand both how social-cultural worlds are made, and the nature of the particular forms of gender and aging (body, nation, etc.) that people believe in. After undergraduate training in religious studies at Brown University and graduate training in anthropology at the University of Chicago, she became a postdoctoral fellow in medical anthropology and sociocultural gerontology at the University of California-San Francisco. Her primary ethnographic research has been carried out in West Bengal, India and among Indian immigrants in the San Francisco and Boston areas of the U.S. She is the author of White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender and Body in North India, co-editor (with Diane Mines) of Everyday Life in South Asia (2002, Indiana University Press), and author of many other articles and book reviews. Her third book in preparation, Aging in India and Abroad: Old Age Homes, Modern Seniors, and Transnational Lives, explores the ways middle class Indians—at home and in the U.S.—are reconfiguring aging as they confront, at once embracing and challenging, processes they associate with “modern,” “Western,” and “global” living. Now Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University, Dr. Lamb teaches a range of courses, including "Contemporary Issues in Anthropological Theory," "Anthropology of Gender," "Global, Transnational and Diasporic Communities," "South Asia: Tradition and the Contemporary Experience," "Anthropology of the Body," and "Medicine, Body and Culture." A firm believer in interdisciplinary approaches, Dr. Lamb is on the steering committees of several interdepartmental Brandeis programs, including Women's and Gender Studies, Global Studies, and Health: Science, Society and Policy. She lives with her spouse, two daughters and a dog, and for recreation enjoys hiking, skiing, backpacking, travel, gardening, and music.
BOOKS
2000 White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender and Body in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press. (www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8710.html)
2002 Everyday Life in South Asia. Diane Mines and Sarah Lamb, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
2009 On the Shores of Endless Worlds: Aging and Modernity in India and Abroad. Indiana University Press (forthcoming).
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS IN BOOKS
1997a The Beggared Mother: Older Women's Narratives in
1997b The Making and Unmaking of Persons: Notes on Aging and Gender in
1999 Aging, Gender and Widowhood: Perspectives from Rural
2001 Being a Widow and Other Life Stories: The Interplay between Lives and Words. Anthropology and Humanism 26(1):16-34.
2001 Generation: Anthropological Aspects. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. N.J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds. Pp. 6043-6046.
2002 Green Earrings: A Widow's Tale. In Personal Encounters in Anthropology: An Introductory Reader. Linda Walbridge and April Sievert, eds. McGraw Hill.
2002 Love and Aging in Bengali Families. In Everyday Life in
2002 Intimacy in a Transnational Era: The Remaking of Aging among Indian Americans. Diaspora 11(3): 299-330.
2004 The Making and Unmaking of Persons: Gender and Body in
2004 McKim Marriott. Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Vered Amit, ed. Pp. 338-339.
2004 Aging and Families Across Worlds: Ambivalent Modernities in Kolkata and the
2005 The Politics of Dirt and Gender: Body Techniques in Bengali
2005 Cultural and Moral Values Surrounding Care and (In)Dependence in Late Life: Reflections from
2007 Aging Across Worlds: Modern Seniors in an Indian Diaspora. In Generations and Globalization: Family, Youth, and Age in the
2007 Lives Outside the Family: Gender and the Rise of Elder Residences in
2007 Modern Families and Independent Living: Reflections on Contemporary Aging. In Transformations in Contemporary Indian Families: Reading Literary and Cultural Texts. Sanjukta Dasgupta, ed. Pp. 81-102.
2009 Elder Residences and Outsourced Sons: The Remaking of Aging in Cosmopolitan
REVIEW ESSAY
2006 Critical Investigations of Age and Aging in the
REVIEWS
1992 Review of Aging and Menopause among Indian South African Women by Brian M. du Toit (State University of New York Press, 1990). American Anthropologist 94(2):485-86.
1993 Stories and Lives. Review of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching by
1997 Review of Social Suffering, edited by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret Lock (Daedalus, Journal of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Winter 1996). American Ethnologist 24(3):671-672.
1998 Review of Body Thoughts, by Andrew Strathern. American Ethnologist 25(3):509.
1998 Book note: Old Age in Transition: The Geriatric Ward, by Peter Woolfson. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8(2):262-263.
1999 Review of No Aging in
2000 Book note: Dying, Death and Bereavement in a British Hindu Community, by Shirley Firth. Religious Studies Review 26(3):301.
2001 Review of Social Aging in a Delhi Neighborhood, by John van Willigen and Narender K. Chadha; and India's Elderly: Burden or Challenge?, by S. Irudaya Rajan, U.S. Mishra, and P. Sankara Sarma. Journal of Asian Studies 60(2):589-591.
2003 Review of Gender, Law, and Resistance in
2004 Review of The Hindu Widow in Indian Literature, by Rajul Sogani. Journal of Asian Studies 63(1):242-243.
2004 Review of Seeking Bauls of
2005 Review of Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in
2006 Beyond Thirdness. Review of With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in
2007 Review of Ageing without Children: European and Asian Perspectives, edited by Philip Kreager and Elisabeth Schroder-Butterfill. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(3):751-752.
COURSES TAUGHT AT BRANDEIS
Introduction to the Comparative Study of Human Societies
Contemporary Anthropological Theory
Anthropology of Gender
Anthropology of the Body
Medicine, Body, Culture
Global, Transnational and Diasporic Communities
South Asian Culture and Society
Readings and Research Courses in: Gender and Sexuality, Medical Anthropology, South Asian Studies, Immigration and Transnationalism, Human Development