1. Edition - April 2010
89.90 Euro
2010. 520 Pages, Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1-4051-1072-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1072-3 - John Wiley & Sons






Sample Chapter

Detailed description
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.
* 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
* 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
* Winner of the 2010 Prose Award for Archaeology and Anthropology

From the contents
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Improving Global Health: The Challenge

Biomedicine as Technology

Does Culture Exist?

A Word about Ethnography

Outline of Chapters

Part I: Technologies and Bodies in Context

Part II: The Biological Standard

Part III: Moral Boundaries and Human Transformations

Part IV: Elusive Agents and Moral Disruptions

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index