Biomedicine as Culture: Instrumental Practices, Technoscientific Knowledge, and New Modes of Life

Summary

This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on contemporary biomedicine as a cultural practice. It brings together leading scholars from cultural anthropology, sociology, history, and science studies to conduct a critical dialogue on the culture(s) of biomedical practice, discussing its epistemic, material, and social implications. The essays look at the ways new biomedical knowledge is constructed within hospitals and academic settings and at how this knowledge changes perceptions, material arrangements, and social relations, not only within clinics and scientific communities, but especially once it is diffused into a broader cultural context.

Table of Contents

Foreword.  Introduction  Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit  I. Social and Cultural Studies of Biomedicine  1. Medicalizing Culture(s) or Culturalizing Medicine(s)  Stefan Beck  2. Metaphors of Medicine and the Culture of Healing: Historical Perspectives  Jakob Tanner  3. Medicine as Practice and Culture: The Analysis of Border Regimes and the Necessity of a Hermeneutics of Physical Bodies  Gesa Lindemann  II. Epistemic Practices and Material Culture(s)  4. The Future Is Now: Locating Biomarkers for Dementia  Margaret Lock  5. Embodied Action, Enacted Bodies: The Example of Hypoglycaemia  Annemarie Mol and John Law  6. Sociotechnical Anatomy  Regula Valérie Burri  7. Risk and Safety in the Operating Theater: An Ethnographic Study of Socio-technical Practices  Cornelius Schubert  III. Biomedical Knowledge in Context  8. Genomic Susceptibility as an Emergent Form of Life? Genetic Testing, Identity, and the Remit of Medicine  Nikolas Rose  9. Susceptible Individuals and Risky Rights: Dimensions of Genetic Responsibility  Thomas Lemke  10. "Pop Genes": An Investigation of "the Gene" in Popular Parlance  Barbara Duden and Silja Samerski  11. Genetics and Its Publics: Crafting Genetic Literacy and Identity in the Early Twenty-first Century  Karen-Sue Taussig  12. Constructing the Digital Patient: Patient Organizations and the Development of Health Web Sites  Nelly Oudshoorn.  Epilogue: Indeterminate Lives, Demands, Relations: Emergent Bioscapes  Joseph Dumit and Regula Valérie Burri

Editor(s) Bio

Regula Valérie Burri is an affiliated research fellow at Collegium Helveticum, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and University of Zurich. Her doctoral thesis, "Doing Images: Zur Praxis medizinischer Bilder" (forthcoming), explores the social and cultural implications of medical imaging. She has been a Swiss National Science Foundation research fellow and holds appointments with several Swiss universities. Her research interests focus on the relationship between science, technology, and society. She is the coauthor of "Social Studies of Scientific Images and Visualization," in Ed Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (with Joseph Dumit; MIT Press).

Joseph Dumit is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and the director of the program in Science and Technology Studies at University of California, Davis. His research interests are the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine; medical anthropology; and social studies. He is the author of Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton University Press, 2004); and the coeditor of Cyborgs & Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies (with Gary L. Downey; SAR Press, 1997), and Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots (with Robbie Davis-Floyd; Routledge, 1998). Dumit is the associate editor of the journal Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry.