An Anthropology of Biomedicine (ePub)

An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting new
introduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusing
on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies
bring about radical changes to societies at large, cultural
anthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician and
medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the
thesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusive
product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned down.

* Introduces biomedicine from an anthropological perspective,
exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history,
environment, culture, and politics

* Develops and integrates an original theory: that the human body
in health and illness is not an ontological given but a moveable,
malleable entity

* Makes extensive use of historical and contemporary ethnographic
materials around the globe to illustrate the importance
of this methodological approach

* Integrates key new research data with more classical material,
covering the management of epidemics, famines, fertility and birth,
by military doctors from colonial times on

* Uses numerous case studies to illustrate concepts such as the
global commodification of human bodies and body parts, modern forms
of population, and the extension of biomedical technologies into
domestic and intimate domains

* Winner of the 2010 Prose Award for Archaeology and
Anthropology