The Department of Asian and Asian American Studies Colloquium Series and Center for India Studies present a talk:

The Limits of Diagnosis: Sex and Law in Indian Psychiatry

Sarah Pinto, Department of Anthropology, Tufts University

Thursday, February 12, 4:00-5:15 PM
Wang Center Lecture Hall 1

This presentation examines the practice and power of narratives of sexuality in the context of medicine and law in north India. It examines the case of a young woman sent to a government hospital for psychiatric evaluation in the case of contested marriage. In considering her case and the role of sexuality in her diagnostic process, I ask what social, symbolic, and narrative processes are involved in medico-legal practice in north India, what reform histories shape the way diagnosis unfolds, and what stories it becomes possible and impossible to tell when love, gender, agency, and rationality are in question.

Sarah Pinto is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University in Medford, MA. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University in 2003 and held an NIMH post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School form 2003-2005. She is the author of "Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India" (Berghahn 2008), co-editor of "Postcolonial Disorders" (University of California Press 2008), and author of numerous articles on gender and health in India.