Lawrence Cohen is Professor of Anthropology and (as of July 1, 2026) Chair of South and Southeast Asian Studies. Since 2014 he has been studying the impact of techniques of database deduplication on the politics, pragmatics, and distributed effects of emergent rationalities of citizenship, surveillance, and distribution of welfare and other forms of value. His focus has been India's Unique Identification Authority and its branded identity instrument, the Aadhaar number. Over the past few years he has extended this work to a range of different uses of deduplication, focusing on genealogy companies and their varying discovery machines amplifying kinship and other relations. Cohen is trained in medical anthropology, geriatric medicine, and the history and philosophy of religion. He has extensive work on political forms in north India viewed through the optic of queer and of transgender moral worlds, on the clinic of old age and dementia in the context of decolonizing societies, and on surgery as ubiquitous feature within landscapes of twentieth century modernization and its discontents.
Job title:
Professor
Department:
Department of Anthropology
Bio/CV:
