“Brothers” or Others? Propriety and Gender for Muslim Arab Sudanese in Egypt by Anita H. Fábos
Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life is a theoretically and methodologically ambitious text.It is at once an attempt to theorize genomics in the context of globalizing aspects of highly capitalized technoscience (p.14) and to do so through a multisited ethnography that is an explicit response to Marcus and Fischer's 1986 call for experimental ethnography.As Sunder Rajan puts it, he seeks "to study locality and particularity in order to map a set of global systems, structures, and terrains" as a means of capturing the "complexities and multiple causalities that constitute contemporary social systems and structures" (p.30).Identifying genomics as one of the rapid changes that mark the contemporary historical moment, Sunder Rajan selects postgenomic drug development marketplaces as a productive arena in which to track how capital, biology, and processes of globalization are drawn into complex assemblages with a range of human and nonhuman actors.Sunder Rajan's study moves across an array of domains in India and the United States, including labs, conferences, trade shows, genome start-up enterprises with joint public and private funding in Hyderabad and Mumbai, and an e-learning start-up company in San Francisco.Sunder Rajan argues that biotechnology represents a new phase of capitalism marked by "an implosion of capitalism with 'life itself'" (p.171) in which biotechnology is inextricably entwined with capital.Bringing Foucault's theorization of the biopolitical into conversation with Marx's historical materialism (p.14), Sunder Rajan argues that the constitution of postgenomic life involves the development of social and material relations along with certain kinds of institutional structures and subjectivities that are always rooted in existing histories with the result that just what postgenomic life is now and will be in the future is constituted in different ways in different places.What is compelling about the book is its groundbreaking effort to move the anthropology of science beyond the industrialized settings that have been the focus of so much Embodying Honor: Fertility, Foreignness, and Regeneration in Eastern Sudan.Amal Fadlalla.
Source: American Ethnologist
Author: AMAL HASSAN FADLALLA
Institution: University of Michigan
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,400
OpenAlex ID: W2038762809