The concept of a universal, standardizable body that can best be technologically manipulated in isolation from its context has become a foundation of biomedicine. An Anthropology of Biomedicine introduces biomedicine from an anthropological perspective, exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history, environment, culture, and politics. Focusing on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies bring about radical changes to societies at large, medical anthropologist Margaret Lock and physician and medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the theory that the human body in health and illness is not an ontological given but a moveable, malleable entity – the elusive product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned down.
Tracking the historic global application of biomedical technologies including the management of epidemics as part of colonial medicine, the control of populations, organ transplants, assisted reproductions, genetic testing and screening, and other technologies the authors reveal the intended and unintended local consequences and the exacerbation of global inequalities and health disparities that such technologies bring about. The argument is put forward that in addition to focusing on the massive impact of poverty and social inequality on health and illness, attention must be given to local biologies, culture, and politics; as well as to the culture of biomedicine and the unexamined assumptions embedded in it. An Anthropology of Biomedicine serves as an important new introduction to the global implications of the implementation of biomedicine.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Biomedical technologies in practice
Chapter 2: The normal body
Chapter 3: Anthropologies of medicine
Second section overview
Chapter 4: Colonial disease and biological commensurability
Chapter 5: Grounds for comparison: biology and human experiments
Chapter 6: The right population
Third section overview
Chapter 7: Who owns the body?
Chapter 8: The social life of human organs
Chapter 9: Making kinship: infertility and assisted reproduction
Fourth section overview
Chapter 10: The sociotechnical self
Chapter 11: Genes as embodied risk
Chapter 12: Global health
Fifth section overview
Chapter 13: From local to situated biologies
Chapter 14: Of microbes and humans
Chapter 15: Genomics, epigenomics, and uncertain futures
Chapter 16: Molecularizing racial difference