1. In an earlier draft of this chapter (Cohen 1992), I used pseudonyms for the four individuals I discuss at length here; in this version, I use the real names. With reflection, issues of honesty and accountability (mine) seemed of greater concern than an imagined and never requested need for confidentiality. [BACK]

2. Bose and Gangrade 1988. Pati and Jena 1989. [BACK]

3. Soodan 1975, Bose and Gangrade (eds.) 1988, Desai (ed.) 1982, Sharma and Dak (eds.) 1987, de Souza and Fernandes (eds.) 1982, Biswas (ed.) 1987, Pati and Jena (eds.) 1989. [BACK]

4. Obviously, there have been books with other titles; the point here is to stress the degree of routinization and the epistemological consequences of social science that must be nominated as "in India." Other works with different titles but similar narratives include Bhatia 1983 and Vijaya Kumar 1991; works with different narratives are fewer, and include Marulasiddaiah's classic 1969 study. [BACK]

5. See George Basalla's discussion of "the spread of Western science" in three similar but less ironically treated phases (1967), as well as Deepak Kumar's critique (1995). [BACK]

6. Soodan 1975: 1.

7. Ibid.: 11. [BACK]

6. Soodan 1975: 1.

7. Ibid.: 11. [BACK]

8. Subrahmanium 1988: vi. [BACK]

9. Gangrade 1988:27. [BACK]

10. See Cohen 1983. [BACK]

11. Desai 1982, Desai 1987, Goyal 1989, Kohli 1987, Mishra 1989, Mohanty 1989, Ramnath 1989, Saxena 1988, Sinha 1989, Srivastava 1988, Subrahmanium 1988. [BACK]

12. United Nations World Assembly on Aging 1982. [BACK]

13. United States Department of State 1982. [BACK]

14. India, Ministry of Welfare 1987. [BACK]

15. United Nations Office at Vienna 1988. [BACK]

16. India, Ministry of Welfare 1988. [BACK]

17. United States Department of State 1982: 1.

18. Ibid.: 3, my italics. [BACK]

17. United States Department of State 1982: 1.

18. Ibid.: 3, my italics. [BACK]

19. Cowgill and Orgren 1979:503-4 [BACK]

20. Cowgill and Holmes 1972. See Robertson 1984. [BACK]

21. Parsons 1949:230-31. [BACK]

22. Burgess 1960. [BACK]

23. De Beauvoir 1972: 321-22. [BACK]

24. Palmore and Manton 1974: 210. [BACK]

25. See Drèze and Sen 1989, Agarwal 1990, 1994, Chen and Dreèze 1992. [BACK]

26. De Souza 1981, De Souza and Fernandes (eds.) 1982. [BACK]

27. Laslett 1985. [BACK]

28. Nydegger 1983. [BACK]

29. Townsend 1981: 9. [BACK]

30. Neysmith and Edwardth 1984: 39. [BACK]

31. Cowgill and Holmes 1972: 310-11. [BACK]

32. Quadagno 1982: 5-6. [BACK]

33. Fischer 1978. See also M. Johnson 1973. [BACK]

34. Minois 1987, but see Cohen 1994 for a critique. [BACK]

35. Fischer 1978; Achenbaum 1985. [BACK]

36. Stearns 1977. [BACK]

37. Quadagno 1982: 22-23. [BACK]

38. Rhoads 1984: 249. [BACK]

39. Reid 1985: 92. [BACK]

40. Nydegger 1983. [BACK]

41. Ross 1982: 286-90. [BACK]

42. Bailey 1957. [BACK]

43. Epstein 1962. [BACK]

44. Epstein 1973: 210. [BACK]

45. Desai 1956. [BACK]

46. Epstein 1973: 201, citing Desai. [BACK]

47. Kolenda 1967, Y. Singh 1973. [BACK]

48. Epstein 1973: 206-10. [BACK]

49. Cohn 1960, Madan 1965, Rao 1968, Gore 1968, Shah 1974, Van der Veen 1976. [BACK]

50. Gray and Mearns (eds.) 1989. [BACK]

51. Propp 1968. [BACK]

52. Nandy 1983. [BACK]

53. See Shweder and Miller 1985, Ramanujan 1989, Daniel 1984, Marriott 1976, 1989, Roland 1988. [BACK]

54. Tharu 1989: 127. [BACK]

55. Ahmad 1992. [BACK]

56. Djurfeldt and Lindberg 1980. See de Souza 1981: 42 for the application of Djurfeldt and Lindberg to the study of the poor eldedy. [BACK]

57. Walford 1983. [BACK]

58. Mahdihassan 1979. [BACK]

59. Ojha and Kumar 1978. [BACK]

60. Capra 1975. [BACK]

61. Francis Zimmermann has recently offered a fairly lengthy critique of my work based upon the following few paragraphs on Chyawanprash (1995). Charging me with the faults of being on the one hand a "cultural relativist" and on the other a champion of biomedical primacy in the tradition of the medical anthropologist George Foster, Zimmermann rightly suggests that any attention to the bodily politics of Chyawanprash is incomplete without an effort to analyze its efficacy and locate this efficacy within a genealogical narrative of herbal medicines (" Si nous nous limitons à décrire les ressorts du succès de l'industrie

ayurvédique qui satisfait à une demande artificiellement suscitée par la publicité et l'idéologie hindoue, comme le fait Cohen, sans poser la question de l'efficacité, nous sombrons dans le relativisme culturel et le cynicisme des observateurs comme George Foster . . . "). His effort to take my argument on the tonic in a different direction is welcome.

Unfortunately, Zimmermann seems less interested in engaging the arguments on the old body presented here than in reading them somewhat awkwardly within what seems to be a contemporary French anxiety over cultural relativism and the associated dangers of the American style. But the point in the paragraphs above is not that Chyawanprash is or is not reducible to the politics of its contemporary commercial or generational dynamics. Rather, it is that the old body is ambiguously framed as a legitimate medical object within a variety of textual and ethnographic materials, that this ambiguity can be heightened and exploited for a variety of clinical or other practical ends, and that efforts to think in thirdperson terms about the relation of "the old body" to particular old bodies in space and time need engage such uses of ambiguity. This point is as relevant for the deployment of allopathy as for that of Ayurveda . [BACK]

62. Somadeva 1968 [1880]. [BACK]

63. See Cohen "The Epistemological Carnival" 1995. [BACK]

64. Jordens 1978: 150-52. [BACK]

65. Bakshi 1991: 88, 174. [BACK]

66. Butalia 1993. [BACK]

67. Goffman 1961, Gubrium 1975. [BACK]

68. Langer 1989. [BACK]

69. Estes 1980. [BACK]

70. Stevens 1987. [BACK]

71. Foucault 1977. [BACK]

72. Banerji 1990 [1929]; Premchand 1978 [1921]. [BACK]

73. Paul 1983. [BACK]

74. Banerjee 1989. [BACK]

75. Sarkar 1989:38. [BACK]

76. Nandy 1980: 7-9. [BACK]

1. Atharva Veda XX: 129-32. Griffith 1895-96:437f. [BACK]