Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India

Sarah Pinto is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. She teaches courses on medical anthropology, gender, and feminist and social theory, with particular attention to cultures of biomedicine, kinship, and political, cultural, and epistemological concerns related to the human body. Her geographic area of specialization is India. She is co-editor of Postcolonial Disorders (University of California 2008), and author of numerous articles on medicine and health intervention in South Asia. She is completing an ethnography of psychiatry's treatment of women patients in urban India, asking how kinship and legal processes related to family life shape clinical practice, and how clinical practice informs subjectivities in and of intimacy. This work is particularly interested in the stakes of mental illness for divorced or divorcing women in India, and asks what these circumstances can tell us about the place of gender in framing culturally relevant ethical frameworks. Pinto is currently developing a research project on the transnational history of hysteria, focusing on dialogues on hysteria between India and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries and their role in shaping contemporary etiologies.