Life Technologies: Medicine, Culture, and Ethics
A Colloquium Series, Spring 2004

Intro | Schedule of Events | Speaker Biographies

Introduction

In today’s world, what it means to be human is under constant negotiation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of biotechnology and medicine. New forms of knowledge are emerging around life’s constitutive matter, and complex technologies and regulations are developed to put this knowledge into play. How are our social organizations, modes of production, and symbolic or cultural forms changing as such projects advance? How do we understand ourselves as affected by these forms of knowledge, technology, commerce, and care?

The colloquium series Life Technologies: Medicine, Culture, and Ethics will confront these questions as they unfold in everyday life. Anthropologists working on a range of issues (the medicalization of suffering, brain death, organ transplantation, genetic knowledge and diagnostics, and biotechnology patenting) and in various countries (North America, China, India, Japan, and England) will present their ethnographic findings and reflections. Scholars from other disciplines (religion, history, philosophy, bioethics, biology, medicine) will respond and a general discussion will follow.

By discussing ethnographic specifics in an interdisciplinary context, the series aims to confront larger issues such as: the movement of scientific knowledge from the laboratory to clinical contexts and to the intimate realms of the body; the refraction of local experiences of disease and health through discriminatory modes and unequal access to technology; shifts in inner life and its relationship to values as well as in the experience of suffering; and the extent to which all these developments engender transformations in our conceptions of pathology, dignity, and well-being. We hope that these conversations will facilitate a complex set of responses to the moral, medical, and political workings of life technologies in our time.

This colloquium series is organized by João Biehl, Professor of Anthropology, and sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion and the Department of Anthropology. Additional support provided by the Center for Health and Wellbeing and the Center for Human Values, Princeton University.