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This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field
of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original
chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research
and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of
human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation,
technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in
different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised around some
of the most important characteristics of anthropological studies of
technology today: the diverse knowledge practices that technologies
involve and on which they depend; the communities, collectives, and
categories that emerge around technologies; anthropology's
contribution to proliferating debates on ethics, values, and
morality in relation to technology; and infrastructures that
highlight how all technologies are embedded in broader political
economies and socio-historical processes that shape and often
reinforce inequality and discrimination while also generating
diversity. All chapters share a commitment to human experiences,
embodiments, practices, and materialities in the daily lives of
those people and institutions involved in the development,
manufacturing, deployment, and/or use of particular technologies.
Chapters 11 and 31 are available open access under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via
link.springer.com.
Drawing on social science perspectives, Contested Categories
presents a series of empirical studies that engage with the often
shifting and day-to-day realities of life sciences categories. In
doing so, it shows how such categories remain contested and
dynamic, and that the boundaries they create are subject to
negotiation as well as re-configuration and re-stabilization
processes. Organized around the themes of biological substances and
objects, personhood and the genomic body and the creation and
dispersion of knowledge, each of the volume's chapters reveals the
elusive nature of fixity with regard to life science categories.
With contributions from an international team of scholars, this
book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social,
legal, policy and ethical implications of science and technology
and the life sciences.
This book explores how conditions for childbearing are changing in
the 21st century under the impact of new biomedical technologies.
Selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) - technologies that aim
to prevent or promote the birth of particular kinds of children -
are increasingly widespread across the globe. Wahlberg and
Gammeltoft bring together a collection of essays providing unique
ethnographic insights on how SRTs are made available within
different cultural, socio-economic and regulatory settings and how
people perceive and make use of these new possibilities as they
envision and try to form their future lives. Topics covered include
sex-selective abortions, termination of pregnancies following
detection of fetal anomalies during prenatal screening, the
development of preimplantation genetic diagnosis techniques as well
as the screening of potential gamete donors by egg agencies and
sperm banks. This is invaluable reading for scholars of medical
anthropology, medical sociology and science and technology studies,
as well as for the fields of gender studies, reproductive health
and genetic disease research.
Drawing on social science perspectives, Contested Categories
presents a series of empirical studies that engage with the often
shifting and day-to-day realities of life sciences categories. In
doing so, it shows how such categories remain contested and
dynamic, and that the boundaries they create are subject to
negotiation as well as re-configuration and re-stabilization
processes. Organized around the themes of biological substances and
objects, personhood and the genomic body and the creation and
dispersion of knowledge, each of the volume's chapters reveals the
elusive nature of fixity with regard to life science categories.
With contributions from an international team of scholars, this
book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social,
legal, policy and ethical implications of science and technology
and the life sciences.
This volume explores how difference is constructed, manifested,
mobilised and obscured in socially uneven societies, particularly
those fuelled by neoliberal economic growth in the recent years.
The book approaches difference as a double edged concept that
allows one to make sense of the tensions that are played out
between 'cosmopolitan' convergence and 'multicultural' diversity,
between expanding middle classes and increasingly disenfranchised
poor groups, between the global and the local. The chapters in this
volume present a series of empirical explorations of how difference
is articulated, desired, levelled, governed and even subverted in
the socio-economically uneven landscapes of India and China. They
examine how difference emerges out of daily practice,
categorisation processes, dividing practices, nation building
efforts and identity projects. Through these empirical studies, we
see how difference is articulated along a number of axes:
differentiations of groups or persons according to hierarchies of
superiority/inferiority; the demarcation of difference as something
that is potentially disruptive and therefore in need of
containment; the 'celebration' of difference as diversity, and
finally, the ways in which difference comes to be internalised in
the shaping of individual identities. Another common theme that
binds a number of contributions is the exploration of the role of
the state in constructing and controlling these differences, and
the ways in which these interventions rearrange the
social-political landscapes. This book was published as a special
issue of Third World Quarterly.
This volume explores how difference is constructed, manifested,
mobilised and obscured in socially uneven societies, particularly
those fuelled by neoliberal economic growth in the recent years.
The book approaches difference as a double edged concept that
allows one to make sense of the tensions that are played out
between 'cosmopolitan' convergence and 'multicultural' diversity,
between expanding middle classes and increasingly disenfranchised
poor groups, between the global and the local. The chapters in this
volume present a series of empirical explorations of how difference
is articulated, desired, levelled, governed and even subverted in
the socio-economically uneven landscapes of India and China. They
examine how difference emerges out of daily practice,
categorisation processes, dividing practices, nation building
efforts and identity projects. Through these empirical studies, we
see how difference is articulated along a number of axes:
differentiations of groups or persons according to hierarchies of
superiority/inferiority; the demarcation of difference as something
that is potentially disruptive and therefore in need of
containment; the 'celebration' of difference as diversity, and
finally, the ways in which difference comes to be internalised in
the shaping of individual identities. Another common theme that
binds a number of contributions is the exploration of the role of
the state in constructing and controlling these differences, and
the ways in which these interventions rearrange the
social-political landscapes. This book was published as a special
issue of Third World Quarterly.
This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field
of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original
chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research
and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of
human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation,
technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in
different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised around some
of the most important characteristics of anthropological studies of
technology today: the diverse knowledge practices that technologies
involve and on which they depend; the communities, collectives, and
categories that emerge around technologies; anthropology’s
contribution to proliferating debates on ethics, values, and
morality in relation to technology; and infrastructures that
highlight how all technologies are embedded in broader political
economies and socio-historical processes that shape and often
reinforce inequality and discrimination while also generating
diversity. All chapters share a commitment to human experiences,
embodiments, practices, and materialities in the daily lives of
those people and institutions involved in the development,
manufacturing, deployment, and/or use of particular technologies.
Chapters 11 and 31 are available open access under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via
link.springer.com.
From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese
sperm banking has become a routine part of China's pervasive and
restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in
each of China's twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen
some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year.
Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who
are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains
insatiable. China's twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep up, spurring
sperm bank directors to publicly lament chronic shortages and even
warn of a national 'sperm crisis' (jingzi weiji). Good Quality
explores the issues behind the crisis, including declining sperm
quality in the country due to environmental pollution, as well as a
chronic national shortage of donors. In doing so, Wahlberg outlines
the specific style of Chinese sperm banking that has emerged,
shaped by the particular cultural, juridical, economic and social
configurations that make up China's restrictive reproductive
complex. Good Quality shows how this high-throughput style shapes
the ways in which men experience donation and how sperm is made
available to couples who can afford it.
From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese
sperm banking has become a routine part of China's pervasive and
restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in
each of China's twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen
some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year.
Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who
are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains
insatiable. China's twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep up, spurring
sperm bank directors to publicly lament chronic shortages and even
warn of a national 'sperm crisis' (jingzi weiji). Good Quality
explores the issues behind the crisis, including declining sperm
quality in the country due to environmental pollution, as well as a
chronic national shortage of donors. In doing so, Wahlberg outlines
the specific style of Chinese sperm banking that has emerged,
shaped by the particular cultural, juridical, economic and social
configurations that make up China's restrictive reproductive
complex. Good Quality shows how this high-throughput style shapes
the ways in which men experience donation and how sperm is made
available to couples who can afford it.
What is a national medicine? What does it mean for a medicine to be
traditional and scientific at the same time? How could a
specifically Vietnamese medicine emerge out of the medical
practices and treatments that have flourished and waned during key
socio-cultural encounters in Vietnam? This book answers these
questions by examining the making of Vietnamese medicine from a
historical and contemporary perspective. Ever since its fourteenth
century emergence out of the traditions and practices of the much
more globally celebrated Chinese medicine, Vietnamese medicine has
been engaged in a constant effort to define, guard and more
recently, revive itself. In this collection of empirically-rich
chapters, international scholars specialising in history,
sociology, anthropology and medicine show how this process has
played out through very much ongoing North-South and West-East
encounters. Vietnamese medicine is practiced, produced and consumed
in contexts of medical pluralism and globalisation, not only within
Vietnam, but increasingly also among the Vietnamese diaspora around
the world. Its development and modernisation cannot be detached
from Vietnam's tumultuous and tragic quest for independence. The
compass points that saturate every chapter in this volume suggest
that the making of Vietnamese medicine has been as much related to
post-colonial national identity formation as it has to national
efforts to address the health problems of the Vietnamese people.
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