An Anthropology of Biomedicine (eBook)

MARGARET LOCK is Professor Emerita at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Dept. of Social Studies of Medicine and Dept. of Anthropology. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Officier de L'Ordre national du Québec, Officer of the Order of Canada, and an elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Author and/or co-editor of 18 books and over 220 articles, Lock is a medical anthropologist whose work focuses on embodiment, comparative epistemologies of medical knowledge, and the global impact of biomedical technologies. VINH-KIM NGUYEN is Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland and at the University of Montreal, Canada. He is also Chair of Anthropology and Global Health at the Collège d'Études mondiales in Paris. He is a medical anthropologist and practicing physician who practices in infectious diseases and emergency care and has worked on the frontlines of global health efforts particularly in West Africa since 1994.

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1

The Argument 1

Interwoven Themes 2

Improving Global Health: The Challenge 4

Biomedicine as Technology 5

Does Culture Exist? 7

A word About Ethnography 10

Section 1

1 Biomedical Technologies in Practice 15

2 The Normal Body 29

3 Anthropologies of Medicine 51

Section 2

4 Colonial Disease and Biological Commensurability 79

5 Grounds for Comparison: Biology and Human Experiments 103

6 The Right Population 127

Section 3

7 Who Owns the Body? 161

8 The Social Life of Human Organs 185

9 Making Kinship: Infertility and Assisted Reproduction 213

Section 4

10 The Sociotechnical Self 241

11 Genes as Embodied Risk 265

12 Global Health 291

Section 5

13 From Local to Situated Biologies 313

14 Of Microbes and Humans 335

15 Genomics, Epigenomics and Uncertain Futures 349

16 Molecularizing Racial Difference 371

Epilogue 385

Notes 389

Bibliography 467

Index 529

"The strength of this re-edited volume is that its analysis and criticism of biomedical practice can be transferred to comparable (and contemporary) negotiations over space and time." - Curare - Journal for Medical Anthropology, VOL 44 (2021) 1-4