Immersed in the body politic
When Susan Greenhalgh says she studies “biopolitics,” one might imagine a form of futuristic, dystopian science. But Greenhalgh’s interests are hardly that. As the newest professor of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, she explores the ways in which policies are shaping how we use and view our bodies here and now. Her work marries large-scale scientific initiatives, from China’s controversial one-child policy to America’s new war on obesity, with the small-scale stories of human lives. Greenhalgh, a native of central Maine, never even took an anthropology course in her years at Wellesley College. But during her senior year, she decided to spend a year off traveling before graduate school. “I didn’t want to be a little rat running around on a treadmill in a cage, without having seen the world,” she said. Mainland China was still closed off to outsiders, so Greenhalgh spent several months in Nepal, where she absorbed...