Karen-Sue Taussig

The Anthropology of Potentiality in Biomedicine An Introduction to Supplement 7

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, potentiality serves as a central concept in the life sciences and in medical practices. This special issue of Current Anthropology explores how genes, cells, bodies, and populations as well as technologies, disciplines, and research areas become imbued with potential. We suggest that anthropologists of the life sciences and biomedicine should work reflexively with the concept of potentiality and the politics of its naming and framing. We lay out a set of propositions and emphasize the moral aspects of claims about potentiality as well as the productivity of the ambiguity involved when dealing with that which does not (yet and may never) exist. We suggest that potentiality is both an analytic—one that has appeared explicitly and tacitly in the history of anthropology—as well as an object of study in need of further attention. To understand contemporary meanings and practices associated with potentiality, we must integrate an awareness of our own social scientific assumptions about potentiality with critical scrutiny of how the word and concept operate in the lives of the people we study.

Introduction. Public Health Genomics: anthropological interventions in the quest for molecular medicine

We introduce this special issue of Medial Anthropology Quarterly on public health genomics by exploring both the unique contribution of ethnographic sensibility that medical anthropologists bring to the study of genomics and some of the key insights offered by the essays in this collection. As anthropologists, we are concerned with the power dynamics and larger cultural commitments embedded in practices associated with public health. We seek to understand, first, the broad significance of genomics as a cultural object and, second, the social action set into motion as researchers seek to translate genomic knowledge and technology into public health benefits.We introduce this special issue of Medial Anthropology Quarterly on public health genomics by exploring both the unique contribution of ethnographic sensibility that medical anthropologists bring to the study of genomics and some of the key insights offered by the essays in this collection. As anthropologists, we are concerned with the power dynamics and larger cultural commitments embedded in practices associated with public health. We seek to understand, first, the broad significance of genomics as a cultural object and, second, the social action set into motion as researchers seek to translate genomic knowledge and technology into public health benefits.

Extremities: Thresholds of Human Embodiment

Emergent conditions of life at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century create new opportunities and challenges for medical anthropology. The articles included in this special issue of Medical Anthropology suggest four areas that call out for more attention: the changing scientific and philosophical status of the human, including definitions of life and biology more broadly; the material consequences of anticipatory fictions; the expanding and intensifying forces invested in the production of bodies; and the emergent and historical conditions shaping expectations and experiences of bodies as they are managed and lived. In elaborating the significance of these issues, we provide an introduction to the articles included in this special issue and point to how the contributions to this collection offer models for approaching emergent forms of life.

Reconceiving the New World Order: Genes, Reproduction, and the Politics of Regenerative Medicine

“The Woman in the Body transformed medical anthropology; after its publication no one could think about medicine or medical anthropology in the same way,” a senior medical anthropologist told me when discussing Emily Martin’s work in the late 1990s. Published in 1987, The Woman in the Body fundamentally changed the way anthropologists approach the body and reproduction. But more than this: arguably it was the first ethnographic monograph to take seriously Allan Young’s insistence that all knowledge is social knowledge, and that anthropologists need to treat the scientific knowledge upon which biomedicine rests as any other social form of knowledge (Young 1982). Rayna Rapp, then well in to her own investigation into the cultural dimensions of amniocentesis (1999), remembers a feeling of “walking on air” after participating in an “author meets critic” session on The Woman in the Body at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association Meetings in 1989. By 1992, Marilyn Strathern had focused her formidable intellect on issues of kinship and technologies associated with reproduction (1992a, 1992b). Building on this energy, Rapp and Faye Ginsburg, who had published her own innovative ethnography on American abortion activists (1989), organized a 1991 Wenner-Gren Symposium on reproduction. The outcome was a remarkable collection of 23 essays in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995). What distinguished this work from earlier work on reproduction was its focus on the body as a site for the exercise of power; its interrogation of authoritative knowledge associated with science, medicine, and biotechnology; and its illustration of the productivity of making reproduction central to social theory. In The Woman in the Body, for example, Martin offered a nuanced analysis of the complex and dynamic interactions among scientific knowledge, medical practices, and everyday life

Genetics: The New Genetics

This article explores what is new about contemporary genetic research. The article examines the everyday work of genetic research and clinical practices in and beyond the laboratory; understandings of human biological variation, including race and ancestry; and the intersections of science, citizenship, and subjectivity. In examining these aspects of contemporary scientific knowledge production, the article demonstrates the deeply social nature of every aspect of contemporary genomics.