Discussion: articles by Kaufman & Morgan, Kent et al.

Sharon R. Kaufman and Lynn M. Morgan, 2005, “The Anthropology of the Beginnings and Ends of Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34:317–41.

why and how can we problematise beginnings and endings? how do biological birth and social birth act to produce persons? how do cultural values attached to abortion, child birth and adoption influence our understandings of the beginnings of life and personhood? what are the connections between life and death? what role do funerary and bereavement rituals play in demarcating life and death? what does it mean to be “not alive” or “not dead”? how does the state regulate dead, dying and decaying bodies? how does the culture of medicine organise the beginning and end of life? what are some biopolitical concerns about emergent life forms? how do bureaucratic forms, marketplace activity and biomedical technique shape current understandings of life and death? what does this attention to biopolitics teach us about attaching value to particular forms of life?

Julie Kent et al., 2006, “Culturing Cells, Reproducing and Regulating the Self,” Body & Society 12(2): 1–23.

what are some of the implications for selfhood if we are now living in a biopolitical age? what distinguishes tissue engineering in terms of social, economic and political relations? what does it mean to treat particular technosciences as products and services? how is tissue engineering involved in the manufacturing and regulating of risk? how is it involved in reproducing and regulating the self? how can tissue engineering be seen to involve inter-corporeality and extra-corporeality? how might these forces constitute new social relations? what kinds of bioethics arise in these new relations?

~ by anne on February 26, 2007.