Stefan Beck

Investigating Emerging Biomedical Practices: Zones of Awkward Engagement on Different Scales

This special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values critically explores a new stage in which the life sciences and biomedical practices have entered. This new stage is marked by postgenomic developments and an increased interest of life sciences in the everyday lives of people outside laboratories and clinical settings. Furthermore, particular attention is given to many chronic and degenerative disorders such as cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or developmental disorders. These developments coincide—or have become entangled—with a new set of interests that an anthropologically inclined science and technology studies (STS) is bringing to the analyses of biomedical practices. An increased interest is observed in the anthropologically inclined STS in studying phenomena on different scales and in exploring fields that are not readily dominated by technoscientific rationality in practice. The introduction to the special issue examines briefly these developments and situates them in a broader genealogy of different movements that have taken place in the anthropologically inclined subfield of STS since the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Staging Bone Marrow Donation as a Ballot: Reconfiguring the Social and the Political Using Biomedicine in Cyprus

The article analyses practices, perceptions and political dramatizations of bone marrow donation in Cyprus. Based on empirical data from an ethnographic study on practices of organ and bone marrow transplantation in postcolonial Cyprus, forms of oppositional biopolitics are analysed that are not bound by the modern, étatist regime of governing populations but capitalize on new developments in biomedicine, on new political movements, as well as on transformations in the political sphere. These reconfigurations are interpreted as instances of an emerging bio-subpolitics that transcends national borders and produces new complexities, interrelations, associations and social forms that come into being alongside biomedicine. At the same time, these developments co-produce cosmopolitan citizens and new subjectivities, transcending nationally bound regimes of political deliberation and identification. These forms of biopolitics mobilize local historical experiences and take advantage of affordances provided by biomedical platforms operating on a global scale that make available an opportunity structure for a cosmopolitan bio-subpolitics.

Embodying Practices: The Human Body as Matter (of Concern) in Social Thought

Recent developments in molecular biology and the neurosciences on body–environment interaction and interdependence have led the natural sciences to prominently challenge the social sciences to refurbish some of the central elements of their theoretical apparatus and enter into joined empirical research. In the neurosciences, and departing from older perspectives, perception, cognition and knowledge are increasingly seen as integral elements of action, dynamically situating/embedding ‘cognitive agents’ in their socio-cultural-natural environments. Likewise, recent research in epigenetics suggests that bodily practices, shaped by their social and material environments within which they are performed, imprint a body that becomes highly susceptible to both past ‘experiences’ of and to present changes in its social and material environment. In this chapter, we critically review the research (practices) that prompted this challenge and discuss how it affects, but does not consider, social theories of interaction, habituation and inheritance. In a second step, we develop a social and practice theory on the basis of a co-laborative research agenda of ‘embodied practice’ that stresses the somatic context, performativity, historicity and dynamic situativity of embedded bodies. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of such an endeavour.