Ayo Wahlberg

Drawing on social science perspectives, Contested Categories presents a series of empirical studies that engage with the often shifting and day-to-day realities of life sciences categories. In doing so, it shows how such categories remain contested and dynamic, and that the boundaries they create are subject to negotiation as well as re-configuration and re-stabilization processes. Organized around the themes of biological substances and objects, personhood and the genomic body and the creation and dispersion of knowledge, each of the volume’s chapters reveals the elusive nature of fixity with regard to life science categories. With contributions from an international team of scholars, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social, legal, policy and ethical implications of science and technology and the life sciences.

Life Sciences in Society

Contested Categories

Susanne Bauer

Cathrine Hasse

Dorthe Brogård Kristensen

Brit Ross Winthereik

Rachel Douglas-Jones

Maja Hojer Bruun

Klaus Hoeyer

This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised around some of the most important characteristics of anthropological studies of technology today: the diverse knowledge practices that technologies involve and on which they depend; the communities, collectives, and categories that emerge around technologies; anthropology’s contribution to proliferating debates on ethics, values, and morality in relation to technology; and infrastructures that highlight how all technologies are embedded in broader political economies and socio-historical processes that shape and often reinforce inequality and discrimination while also generating diversity. All chapters share a commitment to human experiences, embodiments, practices, and materialities in the daily lives of those people and institutions involved in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and/or use of particular technologies.

The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology

Laurence Monnais

C. Michele Thompson

What is a national medicine? What does it mean for a medicine to be traditional and scientific at the same time? How could a specifically Vietnamese medicine emerge out of the medical practices and treatments that have flourished and waned during key socio-cultural encounters in Vietnam? This book answers these questions by examining the making of Vietnamese medicine from a historical and contemporary perspective. Ever since its fourteenth century emergence out of the traditions and practices of the much more globally celebrated Chinese medicine, Vietnamese medicine has been engaged in a constant effort to define, guard and more recently, revive itself. In this collection of empirically-rich chapters, international scholars specialising in history, sociology, anthropology and medicine show how this process has played out through very much ongoing North-South and West-East encounters. Vietnamese medicine is practiced, produced and consumed in contexts of medical pluralism and globalisation, not only within Vietnam, but increasingly also among the Vietnamese diaspora around the world. Its development and modernisation cannot be detached from Vietnam’s tumultuous and tragic quest for independence. The compass points that saturate every chapter in this volume suggest that the making of Vietnamese medicine has been as much related to post-colonial national identity formation as it has to national efforts to address the health problems of the Vietnamese people.

Vietnamese Medicine in the Making

Southern Medicine for Southern People

Lenore Manderson

Nancy J. Burke

Drawing upon the empirical scholarship and research expertise of contributors from all settled continents and from diverse life settings and economies, Viral Loads illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and responses to it, lay bare and load onto people’s lived realities in countries around the world. A crosscutting theme pertains to how social unevenness and gross economic disparities are shaping global and local responses to the pandemic, and illustrate the effects of both the virus and efforts to contain it in ways that amplify these inequalities. At the same time, the contributions highlight the nature of contemporary social life, including virtual communication, the nature of communities, neoliberalism and contemporary political economies, and the shifting nature of nation states and the role of government. Over half of the world’s population has been affected by restrictions of movement, with physical distancing requirements and self-isolation recommendations impacting profoundly on everyday life but also on the economy, resulting also, in turn, with dramatic shifts in the economy and in mass unemployment. By reflecting on how the pandemic has interrupted daily lives, state infrastructures and healthcare systems, the contributing authors in this volume mobilise anthropological theories and concepts to locate the pandemic in a highly connected and exceedingly unequal world. The book is ambitious in its scope – spanning the entire globe – and daring in its insistence that medical anthropology must be a part of the growing calls to build a new world.

Anthropologies of urgency in the time of COVID-19

Viral Loads

Ayo Wahlberg

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