PART I. TECHNOLOGIES AND BODIES IN CONTEXT: Biomedical technologies in practice -- The normal body -- Anthropologies of medicine -- Local biologies and human difference -- PART II. THE BIOLOGICAL STANDARD: The right population -- Colonial disease and biological commensurability -- Grounds for comparisons: biology and human experiments -- PART III. MORAL BOUNDARIES AND HUMAN TRANSFORMATIONS: Who owns the body? -- The social life of organs -- Kinship, infertility, and assisted reproduction -- PART IV. ELUSIVE AGENTS AND MORAL DISRUPTIONS: The matter of the self -- Genes as embodies risk -- Genomics, epigenomics, and uncertain futures -- Human difference revisited.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
"An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting new introduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusing on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies bring about radical changes to societies at large, cultural anthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician and medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the thesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusive product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned down. It introduces biomedicine from an anthropological perspective, exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history, environment, culture, and politics; develops and integrates an original theory: that the human body in health and illness is not an ontological given but a moveable, malleable entity; makes extensive use of historical and contemporary ethnographic materials around the globe to illustrate the importance of this methodological approach; integrates key new research data with more classical material, covering the management of epidemics, famines, fertility and birth, by military doctors from colonial times on; and uses numerous case studies to illustrate concepts such as the global commodification of human bodies and body parts, modern forms of population, and the extension of biomedical technologies into domestic and intimate domains."--Publisher's description.