People

Contact Info:
Tufts University
Department of Anthropology
307 Eaton Hall
Medford, MA 02155

Office: 617.627.5842
Email

Sarah Pinto
Professor

Degrees
Ph.D. Anthropology, Princeton University

Expertise
Medical anthropology, gender, mental health, reproduction, cultures of biomedicine, kinship, global feminism, history of the body. Geographical focus on India.

Major Awards
Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, for "History of Hysteria in India: The Transnational History of a Medical Idea", Radcliffe Institute 2013-2014; Tufts Queer Straight Alliance Dona Yarbrough Prize 2010; Center for Humanities at Tufts Faculty Fellow 2009-2010; Sardar Patel Award for Best Dissertation on Modern India, 2004

Scholarship & Research
My current research and writing are oriented around themes of movement: the global movement of medical ideas about selves and bodies, relationships between bodily movement and subjectivity, and kinship and gender as involving categories and relationships in motion. I am working on a history of hysteria (the medical diagnosis) in India, tracing the long global history of medical ideas about consciousness and trauma, a history that involves the South Asian emergence of gendered ethical paradigms interlinking kinship and medicine. This project has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, through which I was a Frederick Burkhardt fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2013-2014. My 2014 book Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India was awarded the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize for work on gender and health, and my previous publications include Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India, Postcolonial Disorders (co-edited with Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, Byron Good, and Sandra Hyde), and numerous articles on gender, psychiatry, reproduction, kinship, and caste in South Asia.

Publications
Books:
2019. "The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis", Women Unlimited Press and Fordham University Press.

2014. "Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India", University of Pennsylvania Press

2008. Where There is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India. New York: Berghahn Books.

2008. Postcolonial Disorders, co-edited with Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, and Byron Good. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Articles:
2014. "Drugs and the Single Woman: Pharmacy, Fashion, Desire and Destitution in India." Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.

2014. "The Draupadi Strategy: Crafting Autonomy Between Marriage and Sex-work," in Beyond Conjugality, Srimati Basu and Lucinda Ramberg, ed. Women Unlimited, Delhi.

2013. "Movement in Time: Choreographies of Confinement in an In-Patient Ward", in Senses and Citizenship, (Susanna Trnka, Julie Park, Christine Dureau, ed.), Routledge.

2012. "The Limits of Diagnosis: Sex, Law and Psychiatry in a Case of Contested Marriage. Ethos Vol. 40(2).

2011. "Rational Love, Relational Medicine: Psychiatry and the Accumulation of Precarious Kinship" Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry [forthcoming, October 2011].

2011. "Cultures of the Psyche, Politics of Illness" In Companion to the Anthropology of India, ed. Isabelle Clark-Deces. New York: Blackwell.

2009. "Crises of Commitment: Ethics of Intimacy, Kin and Confinement in Global Psychiatry" Medical Anthropology Volume 28, Number 1, 1-10.

2008. "Consuming Grief: Infant Death in the Postcolonial Time of Development" In Postcolonial Disorders, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron Good ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2008. "Introduction" co-authored with Byron Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good and Sandra Hyde, In Postcolonial Disorders, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron Good, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 359-377.

2006. "More than a Dai: Birth, Work and Rural Dalit Women's Perspectives" Seminar, special issue Dalit Perspectives, ed. Ramnarayan Rawat.

2006. "Grief and the Politics of Depressing Speech" Social Text, 86, Spring, 81-102.

2005. "Divisions of Labor: Rethinking the Midwife in Rural Uttar Pradesh," in Birth and Birth-workers: The Power Behind the Shame. J. Chawla, ed. Delhi: Har-Anand Publishers, Shakti Series, 203-238.

2004. "Development without Institutions: Ersatz Medicine and the Politics of Everyday Life in Rural North India" Cultural Anthropology, Vol 19, No. 3, 337-364.

2003. "Dalit Women and the Predicaments of Reproductive Health Care," In Dalit International Newsletter. J. Webster, ed. Fall.

2000. (co-authored with Janet Chawla) "The Female Body as Battleground of Meaning" In Mental Health From a Gender Perspective. B. Davar, ed. Delhi: Sage Publications, 181-216.