Abstract:
Recent anthropological work on biomedical technologies, deals with personhood (Squier 2004), processes of identity formation (Martin 2007), the varied forms of human and non-human connectedness (Rock and Babinec 2008), the impacts of political economies on health technologies and healing performances (Delvecchio Good 2001), economic exchanges based on human tissue trading (Waldby and Mitchell 2006; Thacker 2005) and the context-specific elaboration of moral worlds of treatment (Battles and Manderson 2008). Our focus for this chapter is instead to explore biotechnology and care because much of the recent work attends to the “high tech/low touch” end of the biotechnology spectrum. ...