Lawrence Cohen is a scholar of religion and a medical anthropologist. Much of his work has focused on the norms and forms of political life in India, attending to questions of old age and the place of the family in the decolonization of knowledge; to the sexual and gendered logics of "backwardness"; and to the mediation and regulation of markets in human organs as sites to think about ethics as public culture.

For the past decade he has studied contending models of biometrics and big data in the control and governance of economy and society, with a focus on India's massive "Aadhaar" identification project.