Remaking a World completes a triptych of volumes on social suffering, violence, and recovery. Social Suffering, the first volume, deals with sources and major forms of social adversity, with an emphasis on political violence. The second, Violence and Subjectivity, contains graphic accounts of how collective experience of violence can alter individual subjectivity. This third volume explores the ways communities "cope" with--endure, work through, break apart under, transcend--traumatic and other more insidious forms of violence, addressing the effects of violence at the...

Tales about organ transplants appear in mythology and folk stories, and surface in documents from medieval times, but only during the past twenty years has medical knowledge and technology been sufficiently advanced for surgeons to perform thousands of transplants each year. In the majority of cases individuals diagnosed as "brain dead" are the source of the organs without which transplants could not take place. In this compelling and provocative examination, Margaret Lock traces the discourse over the past thirty years that contributed to the locating of a new criterion of death in the...

This thought-provoking volume explores women's responses to medical issues and technologies, from infertility in East Africa to prenatal screening in America. It also addresses wider themes, including the emergence of the breast cancer movement, and reactions to environmental hazards. In a series of accessible case studies, the contributors show that women react pragmatically to medical technology, with responses ranging from acceptance to resistance to indifference. This book will be a key text in medical anthropology and women's studies.

This thought-provoking volume explores women's responses to medical issues and technologies, from infertility in East Africa to prenatal screening in America. It also addresses wider themes, including the emergence of the breast cancer movement, and reactions to environmental hazards. In a series of accessible case studies, the contributors show that women react pragmatically to medical technology, with responses ranging from acceptance to resistance to indifference. This book will be a key text in medical anthropology and women's studies.

This stimulating collection of essays, a product of a dialogue among anthropologists, sociologists, and philosopher-historians, focuses on the newly created biomedical technologies and their practical applications. Drawing on ethnographic and historical case studies, the authors show how biomedical technologies are produced through the agencies of tools and techniques, scientists and doctors, funding bodies, patients, and the public. Despite shared concerns, the authors achieve no consensus about their research objectives, and deep epistemological divides clearly remain, making for...

Over the past several decades, scholars in both the social sciences and humanities have moved beyond the idea that there is a "body proper" a singular, discrete biological organism with an individual psyche. They have begun to perceive embodiment as dynamic rather than static, as experiences that vary over time and across the world as they are shaped by discourses, institutions, practices, technologies, and ideologies. What has emerged is a multiplicity of bodies, inviting a great many disciplinary points of view and modes of interpretation. The forty-seven readings presented in this volume...

The culture of contemporary medicine is the object of investigation in this book; the meanings and values implicit in biomedical knowledge and practice and the social processes through which they are produced are examined through the use of specific case studies. The essays provide examples of how various facets of 20th century medicine, including edu cation, research, the creation of medical knowledge, the development and application of technology, and day to day medical practice, are per vaded by a value system characteristic of an industrial-capitalistic view of the world in which the idea...

In this fully revised and updated second edition of An Anthropology of Biomedicine, authors Lock and Nguyen introduce biomedicine from an anthropological perspective, exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history, environment, culture, and politics.