Anthropology 253: Theory in Medical
and Psychiatric Anthropology: Culture, Science and the Body
Harvard University, Spring 1999
Byron J. Good, Professor of Medical Anthropology,
Dept. of Social Medicine and Dept. of Anthropology
With Karen-Sue Taussig, Ph.D.,
Fellow, Dept. of Social Medicine
This course will review theoretical positions and debates in
medical and psychiatric anthropology, with special attention to
cultural studies of the biosciences and biomedicine and to recent
critical and phenomenological accounts of the body. The course will
provide a historical review of theoretical traditions in medical
anthropology, focusing in particular on the interpretive tradition
in medical anthropology and the cultural studies tradition in
science studies, and will examine recent writing in the field at the
interface of the two.
The format of the course will include discussion, commentaries,
and occasional lectures. During the first hour, two students will
lead a critical discussion of the required readings for that day.
Course instructors will provide formal commentaries for the final 30
minutes of each class.
The course has three requirements. First, each student will be
expected to participate in leading the discussion of required (and
suggested) readings during one class period. Second, each student
will be expected to write a brief precis -- a summary of critical
thoughts that arise during your reading -- about several or all of
the required readings for six classes. These should be left in my
mail box (3rd floor, William James Hall) in quadruplicate at 5:00
each Monday afternoon, and will be used by instructors and
discussion leaders to organize discussion for the day. Third, each
student will be expected to write a final research paper (ca. 15-25
pages), reviewing theoretical issues related to some substantive
matter of interest to the student or directly addressing a
theoretical issue of relevance to medical anthropology. This
paper will be due the last day of reading period. Students may wish
to combine these three exercises, focusing their final paper on
issues raised in their precis's and the readings of the week for
which they are discussion leaders. Class participation and the
precis's will contribute 40% and the research paper 60% to the final
course grade.
Books ordered at the COOP include Byron Good, Medicine,
Rationality and Experience; Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit,
Cyborgs & Citadels; Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, American Medicine: The
Quest for Competence; Thomas Csordas, The Sacred Self: A Cultural
Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing; J. Crary and S. Kwinter,
eds., Incorporations; Cheryl Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical
Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience; Sarah Franklin,
Embodied Progress; Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology; Lawrence
Cohen, No Aging in India; Sandra Harding, The "Racial" Economy of
Science.
ANTHROPOLOGY 253: THEORY IN MEDICAL AND PSYCHIATRIC
ANTHROPOLOGY: CULTURE, SCIENCE AND THE BODY
Harvard University, Spring Semester 1999
Prof. Byron J. Good, with Karen-Sue Taussig
COURSE OUTLINE AND READING LIST
FEBRUARY 4: Introduction to the Course
- Provide a historical overview of theoretical approaches to the
study of culture and illness, systems of healing, and comparative
studies of medical knowledge. Discuss recent developments in
cultural studies of science, particularly of the biosciences,
biotechnology and biomedicine. Discuss new directions for medical
anthropology that emerge from the joining of interpretive
approaches, critical theory, and cultural studies of science.
- Discuss format and requirements of the class.
FEBRUARY 11: From Cyborgs & Citadels: Contemporary Writing at
the Interface of Medical Anthropology and Cultural Studies of
Science
Read and discuss recent articles that cross the boundaries
between science studies and medical anthropology, including articles
from Downey and Dumit, Cyborgs & Citadels: Anthropological
Interventions in Emerging Sciences, Technologies and Medicines.
Raise questions about theoretical sources of these essays and
implications of the theoretical positions taken.
Readings:
- From Cyborgs & Citadels:
- Gary Downey & Joseph Dumit. "Introduction: Locating and
Intervening"
- Rayna Rapp, "Real Time Fetus: The Role of the Sonogram in the
Age of Monitored Reproduction"
- Emily Martin, Laury Oaks, Karen-Sue Taussig, Ariane van der
Straten, "AIDS, Knowledge and Discrimination in the Inner City: An
Anthropological Analysis of the Experiences of Injection Drug Users"
- Deborah Heath, "Bodies, Antibodies and Modest Interventions"
- Joseph Dumit, "A Digital Image of the Category of the Person:
PET Scanning and Objective Self-Fashioning"
- Donna J. Haraway, "Mice into Wormholes: A Comment on the Nature
of No Nature"
- Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good. 1995. "Cultural Studies of
Biomedicine: An Agenda for Research." Social Science & Medicine
41:461-473.
- Sarah Franklin. 1995. "Science as culture, cultures of
science." Annual Review of Anthropology 24:163-184.
FEBRUARY 18: Competing Epistemologies, Competing Rationalities:
Rationality, Relativism and Beyond
- Discuss why issues of epistemology are crucial for medical
anthropology, with special reference to Medicine, Rationality and
Experience.
- Review classic debates about the social construction of
scientific knowledge in the sociology of science.
- Review recent critiques of these debates and suggestions for new
directions for cultural studies of science. What questions do these
raise for comparative studies of medical knowledge and
practices?
Readings:
- Good, Byron. 1994. Medicine, Rationality and Experience. Chs.
1-4,7.
- Hess, David J. "If You're Thinking of Living in STS... A Guide
for the Perplexed." Ch. 8, Cyborgs and Citadels.
- Woolgar, Steve. 1983. Irony in the Social Study of Science.
In Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay, Science Observed, pp.
239-266.
- Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action. How to Follow
Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Harvard University Press.
Read Introduction: "Opening Pandora's Black Box" (pp. 1-17), and
Ch. 5, "Tribunals of Reason" (pp. 179-213).
- Rouse, Joseph. 1992. What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific
Knowledge? Configurations 1:1-22.
- Fischer, Michael M.J. 1991. Anthropology as Cultural Critique:
Insert for the 1990s. Cultural Studies of Science, Visual-Virtual
Realities, and Post-Trauma Polities. Cultural Anthropology
6:525-537.
- Traweek, Sharon. 1993. "An Introduction to Cultural and Social
Studies of Sciences and Technologies." Culture, Medicine and
Psychiatry 17:3-25.
- Rabinow, Paul. 1994 [1986]. Representations are Social Facts.
Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology. In Rabinow, Essay on
the Anthropology of Reason (originally in Clifford and Marcus,
Writing Culture).
- Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand
Plateaus. Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Translator's Foreword:
Pleasures of Philosophy, by Brian Massumi (pp. ix-xv).
- Sargent, Carolyn, and Grace Bascope. 1996. Ways of Knowing
about Birth in Three Cultures. MAQ 10:13-236.
Suggested:
- Mulkay, Michael and G. Nigel Gilbert. 1982. Joking Apart:
Some Recommendations Concerning the Analysis of Scientific Culture.
Social Studies of Science 12:585-613.
- Sperber, Dan. 1977. On Anthropological Knowledge. Cambridge:
Cambridge Un. Press. Ch.3: The problem of irrational beliefs.
- Gilbert, G. Nigel, and Michael Mulkay. 1984. Opening Pandora's
Box: A Sociological Analysis of Scientists' Discourse. Cambridge:
Cambridge Un. Pr.
- Rouse, Joseph. 1987. Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political
Philosophy of Science. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
- Robert D'Amico. 1989. Historicism and Knowledge. NY:
Routledge.
- Putnam, Hilary. 1978. The Many Faces of Realism. LaSalle, Ill.:
Open Court.
- Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time,
Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Harding, Sandra. 1998. Is Science Multi-Cultural?
Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies. Indiana University
Press.
- Davis-Floyd, Robbie, and Carolyn Sargent, eds. 1996. The
Social Production of Authoritative Knowledge in Pregnancy and
Childbirth. Special Issue of MAQ Vol. 10 (2).
FEBRUARY 25: Foundations for Interpretive Theories of Culture
and Knowledge
MARCH 4: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Phenomenology
- Discuss phenomenology as a method for investigating experience,
critiques of phenomenology, and the potential for a 'critical
phenomenology'.
- Examine Csordas's understanding of the body as creative source
of experience and the locus of healing.
- Examine phenomenology as a means for exploring experiences of
human suffering and illness.
MARCH 11: Ethnographic Writing On the Margins of Interpretive
Theory (1)
- Review ethnographic writing, relevant to medical
anthropology, that expands the bases of interpretive theory or
challenges such theory from the perspective of post-structuralism or
critical theory.
Readings:
- Cohen, Lawrence. 1998. No Aging in India. Alzheimer's, the
Bad Family, and Other Modern Things. Berkeley: Un of Calif Press.
Read Introduction, Chs. 1-3, 5.
- Khare, R.S. 1995. The Body, Sensoria, and Self of the
Powerless: Remembering/"Re-Membering" Indian Untouchable Women.
New Literary History 26:147-168.
- Laughlin, Kim. 1995. Rehabilitating Science, Imagining Bhopal.
In Late Editions 2, Technoscientific Imaginaries. George Marcus,
ed. Un. of Chicago Pr.
MARCH 18: Ethnographic Writing On the Margins of Interpretive
Theory (2): On the Position of Ethnographic Subject
- Review ethnographic writing, relevant to medical
anthropology, that expands the bases of interpretive theory or
challenges such theory from the perspective of post-structuralism or
critical theory. Special focus on the position of the medical
anthropologist in the research and in the text.
Readings:
- Desjarlais, Robert. 1995. Struggling Along: The Possibilities
for Experience among the Homeless Mentally Ill. American
Anthropologist 96:886-901.
- Kleinman, Arthur, and Joan Kleinman. 1991. Suffering and Its
Professional Transformation: Toward an Ethnography of Interpersonal
Experience. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 15:275-301.
- FavretSaada, Jeanne. 1980. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the
Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ch 1-3, 5, Appendix
5.
- Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild
Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. Ch 7-9.
- Stewart, Kathleen. 1991. On the politics of cultural theory: a
case for "contaminated" cultural critique. (Culture and Politics).
Social Research Summer 58:395.
- Fortun, Kim. (Forthcoming) Advocating Bhopal:
Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Book ms.,
forthcoming from the U. of Chicago Press. Pp. 224-228, 450-465,
541-544.
Suggested:
- Desjarlais, Robert. 1997. Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood
among the Homeless. Un. of Penn. Press.
MARCH 25: On Signs: Semiotics to Poststructuralism
- Review historical and theoretical foundations for
post-structuralist theories of the subject and the cultural studies
tradition.
- Discuss the different relations posited between subjects and
semiotic systems (e.g. subject in language, subject as effect of
language, genetic subject, split subject).
- Discuss some feminist inflections of gendered and otherwise
politicized subjects.
Readings:
- Saussure, Ferdinand de, Charles ed Bally, Albert ed Sechehaye,
and Albert Riedlinger. 1974. Course in general linguistics.
London: Fontana. Intro Ch. 2,3,5. Pt I: Ch. 1,2.
- Jakobson, Roman. 1985. Dear Claude, Cher Maitre. In Blonsky M
(ed.) On Signs. Oxford, UK: B. Blackwell.
- Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. 1975. Fundamentals of
language. The Hague: Mouton. (selection).
- Lacan, Jacques. 1977. The Mirror Stage. In Ecrits. A
Selection. London. Tavistock.
- Grosz, Elizabeth A. 1990. Ch. 2: The Ego and the Imaginary.
In Jacques Lacan: A feminist Introduction. New York: Routledge.
- Derrida, Jacques. Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences (with discussion). In Macksey R & Donato E (eds.)
The Structuralist Controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press. Plus preface to book.
- Barthes, Roland. 1972. World of Wrestling. and Myth Today. In
Mythologies. New York: Noonday Press.
- de Lauretis, Teresa. 1984. Ch 6: Semiotics and Experience. In
Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
- Donna Haraway. 1992. When Man(tm) is On the Menu. In
Incorporations, pp. 3642.
- Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky. 1992. Epidemics of the Will. In
Incorporations. New York: Zone, pp. 582595.
Recommended:
- Greimas, A.J. 1983 (1966). Structural Semantics: An Attempt
at a Method. Lincoln: U Nebraska Press.
- Jameson, Frederic. 1987. Forward. In A.J. Greimas, On
Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
- Grosz, Elizabeth A. 1989. Sexual Subversions: Three French
Feminists. Winchester, Mass.: Unwin Hyman.
- Hawkes, Terrance. Structuralism and Semiotics.
- Virilio, Paul. 1992. Aliens. In Incorporations, pp. 446449.
- Eco, Umberto. 1979. A theory of semiotics. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
- Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural anthropology. New York:
Basic Books.
APRIL 1: SPRING BREAK
APRIL 8: Cultural Studies of the Body, Ideology and
Identity
- Review current theorizing of the body in medical anthropology.
- Review competing theories of ideology and subjectivity in
relation to cultural studies and mass media.
- Examine contemporary attempts to account for the "ideology" of
science and discuss on their value for medical anthropology.
Reading:
- Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Margaret Lock. 1987. The Mindful
Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology. Medical
Anthropology Quarterly 1(1):6-41.
- Lock, Margaret. 1993. Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and
Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge. Annual Review of
Anthropology 22:133-155.
- Mauss, M. Techniques of the Body. In Incorporations.
- Canguilhem, G. Machine and Organism. In Incorporations.
- Rabinbach, A. Neurasthenia and Modernity. In Incorporations.
- Martin, Emily. 1990. Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The
Body as Nation State. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 4(4): 410-426.
- Martin, Emily. 1992. The End of the Body? American Ethnologist
19(1): 121-140.
- Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology
and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians,
Cyborgs and Women, D. Haraway, ed. New York: Routledge.
- Foucault, Michel. 1980. The Confession of the Flesh. In
Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972-1977. NY: Pantheon.
- Hall, Stuart. 1996. On Postmodernism and Articulation: An
Interview with Stuart Hall, edited by Lawrence Grossberg. In D
Morley & KH Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies. Routledge.
- Hall, Stuart. 1996. Cultural Studies and the Politics of
Internationalization: An interview with Stuart Hall, by KuanHsing
Chen. In D Morley & KH Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical
Dialogues in Culural Studies. Routledge.
- Treichler, Paul A. 1991. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic:
The Evolution of AIDS Treatment Activism. In C Penley & A Ross
(ed.): Technoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
pp. 57106.
Recommended:
- Slavoj Zizek. 1994. The Spectre of Ideology. In S Zizek (ed.):
Mapping Ideology. London: Verso.
- Michel Foucault. 1980. Power/Knowledge. ch 3: Body/Power; ch
6: Truth and Power.
- Hubert L. Dreyfus & Paul Rabinow. 1982. Michel Foucault:
Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: Un of Chicago
Press. Esp. ch. 8 The Geneology of the Modern Individual as
Subject.
- Althusser. Ideological State Apparatuses. In S Zizek (ed.):
Mapping Ideology. London: Verso.
- Jean Francois Lyotard (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Baudrillard, Jean, and Charles Levin. 1981. For a critique of
the political economy of the sign. St. Louis, Mo.: Telos Press.
- Gilroy, Paul. 1987. "There ain't no black in the Union Jack":
the cultural politics of race and nation. London: Hutchinson.
- Nancy Krieger, and Mary Bassett. 1994. The Health of Black
Folk: Disease, Class and Ideology in Science. In "Racial" Economy
of Science, pp. 161169.
- Robert Proctor. 1994. Nazi Medicine and the Politics of
Knowledge. In "Racial" Economy of Science, pp. 344358.
- Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman. 1994. Appropriating the
Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism. In "Racial"
Economy of Science, pp. 170200.
- Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio, T. Munakata, Y. Kobayashi, C.
Mattingly, B. J. Good. 1994. Oncology and Narrative Time. Social
Science and Medicine 38(6):855-862.
- Ella Shohat. 1992. LasersForLadies Endo Discourse And
The
Inscriptions Of Science (The Realization Of Endometriosis As A Real
Disease). Camera Obscura N29:57. Cultural Studies. NY: Routledge.
- Tom Csordas. 1994. Embodiment and Experience. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
- Conklin, B. and L. Morgan. 1996. Babies, Bodies, and the Social
Production of Personhood in North America and Native Amazonia.
Ethos 24(4):657-694.
- Terry Turner. 1994. Bodies and Anti-Bodies: Flesh and Fetish in
Contemporary Social Theory. In Embodiment and Experience: The
Existential Ground of Culture and Self, T. Csordas, ed. Cambridge
University Press.
APRIL 15: Narrativity, Justice and Bodies
- Review theories of narrativity in relation to experience,
storytelling and history.
- Discuss strategies for writing about narratives with examples
from medical anthropology, including clinical settings, personal
experiences with illness, and political/ environmental
disasters.
Reading:
- Cheryl Mattingly. 1998. Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots. The
Narrative Structure of Experience. Cambridge Un. Press.
- Good, Byron. 1994. Medicine, Rationality and Experience. ch.6.
- Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. The Narrative Function. In Ricoeur,
Hermeneutics & the Human Sciences. Cambridge Un Press, 274-296.
- Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The Act of Reading: A Theory of
Aesthetic Response. Johns Hopkins Un Pr. Pp.107-134.
- Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1993. The Post-Modern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge. Un. of Minn. Press. Pp.18-41.
- Das, Veena. 1990. Our Work to Cry: Your Work to Listen. In
Veena Das, ed., Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia.
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Das, Veena. 1995. Suffering, Legitimacy and Healing: The
Bhopal Case. In Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological
Perspective on Contemporary India, pp. 137-174. (Delhi, Oxford
University Press)
- Spicer, Paul. 1998. Narrativity and the Representation of
Experience in American Indian Discourses about Drinking. Culture,
Medicine & Psychiatry 22:139-169.
Suggested:
- White, Hayden. 1978. Interpretation in History. In Tropics of
Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
- Roe, Emery. 1994. Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and
Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.
- Hunt, Linda M., and Cheryl Mattingly, eds. 1998. Rationality
in the Real World: Varieties of Reasoning in Illness and Healing.
Special Volume of MAQ (12)3.
APRIL 22: Narratives and their Effects (Prof. Mary-Jo
Good)
- Examine the concept clinical narratives and its value in linking
clinical transactions to culture and political economy.
- Reflect on conducting ethnography of high tech medicine -- in
high tech and low tech settings.
- Discuss political/ideological contexts for production and
reception of narratives and for narrative effects.
Readings:
- Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio. 1995. American Medicine: The Quest
for Competence. Berkeley: Un of Calif Press. Special focus on
chs. 6-9.
- Layne, Linda L. 1996. "How's the Baby Doing?" Struggling with
Narratives of Progress in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. MAQ
10:624-656.
- Kaufman, Sharon R. 1997. The World War II Plutonium Experiments:
Contested Stories and their Lessons for Medical Research and
Informed Consent. Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 21:161-197.
- Phillida Bunkle. 1994. Calling the Shots? The International
Politics of DepoProvera. In "Racial" Economy of Science, pp.
287302.
- Jones, James. 1994. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment: "A Moral
Astigmatism". In "Racial" Economy of Science, pp. 275286.
Suggested:
- Monica J. Casper and Barbara A. Koenig, eds. 1996. Biomedical
Technologies: Reconfiguring Nature and Culture. Special Issue of
Medical Anthropology Quarterly 10: 523-690.
APRIL 29: Time, Space and Subject in Medical Anthropology
- Discuss the representation of time, space and subjectivity in
ethnographic writing in medical anthropology.
- Discuss the need for and implications of distributed fieldsites
for contemporary medical anthropology.
- Discuss the political economy of international biomedicine with
regard to medical anthropology and critical cultural studies.
Readings:
- Marcus, George E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system:
the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of
Anthropology 24:95-117.
- Johannes Fabian. 1983. Time and Writing about the Other. Ch.
3, in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object.
Columbia Un. Pr.
- B. Claeson, E. Martin, W. Richardson, M. Schoch-Spana, and K.S.
Taussig. 1996. 'Scientific Literacy', What It Is, Why It's
Important, and Why Scientists Think We Don't Have It: The Case of
Immunology and the Immune System. In Naked Science, Laura Nader, ed.
New York: Routledge.
- Rapp, Rayna. 1995. Heredity, or: Revising the Facts of Life.
In Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, eds. Naturalizing Power:
Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis. NY: Routledge.
- Farmer, Paul. 1996. On Suffering and Structural Violence: A
View from Below. In Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock,
eds. Social Suffering. Special issue of Daedelus, Winter 1996, 125
(1):261-283.
- Allucquere Roseanne Stone. 1992. Virtual Systems. In
Incorporations, pp. 608625.
- Rabinow, Paul. 1992. Artificiality and Enlightenment: From
Sociobiology to Biosociality. In Incorporations, pp. 190201.
- Rabinow, Paul. 1996 [1992]. Severing the Ties: Fragmentation
and Dignity in Late Modernity. In Rabinow, Essays in the
Anthropology of Reason. Princeton Un. Pr.
- Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds. 1997. Anthropological
Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Un. of
Calif. Press. Introduction.
Recommended:
- George Marcus. 1998. Ethnography through Thick and Thin.
Princeton.
- Arjun Appadurai. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization. Un. of Minn. Press.
- Susantha Goonatilake. 1994. Modern Science and the Periphery:
The Characteristics of Dependent Knowledge. In "Racial" Economy of
Science, pp. 259273.
- Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. 1994. Applied Biology in
the Third World: The Struggle for Revolutionary Science. In "Racial"
Economy of Science, pp. 315325.
- Dorion Sagan. Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity. In
Incorporations.
- Francisco Varela. The Reenchantment of the Concrete. In
Incorporations.
MAY 6: Ethnography of Contemporary Biotech Research: The Case
of Genetics and the Geneticization of Life
- Review the history eugenics and its intimate links to the
emergence of molecular biology.
- Examine anthropological studies of genetic testing, genetic
screening, and genetic counselling. Note importance of such research
as interface of feminist theorizing, science studies and medical
anthropology.
Readings:
- Franklin, Sarah. 1997. Embodied Progress. New York: Routledge.
Selections.
- Lewontin, Richard. 1992. Biology as Ideology. New York: Harper
Perenial.
- Kevles, Daniel. 1985. In the Name of Eugenics. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP. Chs. 1,3,4,7,8.
- Duster, Troy. 1990. Backdoor to Eugenics. New York: Routledge.
Chs 1 and 7.
- Taussig, Karen Sue. MS. Bovine Abominations: Genetic Culture and
Politics in the Netherlands.
- Taussig, Karen Sue, Rayna Rapp, Deborah Heath. 1998. Soft
Eugenics: Discourses of Perfectibility and Free Choice at the End of
the 20th Century. Paper presented at the annual meetings of the
American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, PA, 4 December.
- Proctor, Robert N. 1995. The Destruction of 'Lives Not Worth
Living.' In Deviant Bodies, J. Terry and J. Urla, eds. Pp. 170-196.
Bloomington,IN: Indiana University Press.
Suggested:
- Heath, Deborah, and Paul Rabinow. 1993. Bio-Politics: The
Anthropology of the New Genetics and Immunology. Special Issue of
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 17(1).
- Hubbard, Ruth and Elijah Wald. 1993. Exploding the Gene Myth.
Boston: Beacon. Chs 1 and 4.
- Gudding, Gabriel. 1996. The Phenotype/Genotype Distinction and
the Disappearance of the Body. Journal of the History of Ideas
57(3):525-545.
- Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. Reproducing the Future. New York:
Routledge.
- Marks, Jonathan. 1995. On Human Biodiversity. Aldine.
- Rabinow, Paul. 1996. Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
- Martin, Emily. 1994. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in
American Culture From the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Boston:
Beacon Press.
- Canguilhem, Georges. 1989. The Normal and the Pathological.
NY: Zone Books.
Back to my syllabi.
Created on: 24 March 1999.
Last updated: 24 March 1999.