Expertise

Social-cultural theory. Gender studies. Anthropology of aging. Medical anthropology. Person and self. Immigrant and transnational communities. South Asia. South Asian Americans.

Profile

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 United States. She is the author of White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender and Body in Northeast 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, Aging and the Indian Diaspora: Cosmopolitan Families in India and Abroad (forthcoming July 2009), 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. Dr. Lamb teaches a range of courses, including "Contemporary Issues in Anthropological Theory," "Anthropology of Gender," "Global, Transnational and Diasporic Communities," "South Asian Cultures and Societies," "Anthropology of the Body," and "Medicine, Body and Culture." A firm believer in interdisciplinary approaches, Dr. Lamb co-chairs Brandeis's South Asian Studies Program and serves on the steering committees for Women's and Gender 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.