Friday, March 6, 2015
2:00pm – 4:00pm
Watson Institute, McKinney Conference Room
111 Thayer Street
Free admission
Friday, March 6 at 2:00 p.m.
Sarah Pinto, Tufts University — Beyond Translation: The Story of Hysteria in India
McKinney Conference Room
Sarah Pinto is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University with interests in gender, subjectivity, and the social life of medical practice, with a geographical focus on India. Pinto received her PhD in anthropology from Princeton University in 2003. Her dissertation on childbirth and child loss in rural north India received a 2003 Sardar Patel Award for the best dissertation on modern India. Pinto is the author of Where there is no midwife: Birth and loss in rural India (Berghahn Books, 2008) and Daughters of Parvati (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), and has co-edited Postcolonial Disorders (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
Pinto’s most recent publication, Daughters of Parvati, centers on the lives of women in different settings of psychiatric care in northern India, particularly the contrasting environments of a private mental health clinic and a wing of a government hospital. Pinto challenges the dominant framework for addressing crises such as long-term involuntary commitment, poor treatment in homes, scarcity of licensed practitioners, heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and the ways psychiatry may reproduce constraining social conditions.