Class Outline

• Technology: possibility and determination?
• (Ethno-)Methodology for (de)constructing human production
• Human (dis-)abilities: expansions through tools and institutions
• Hoes, plows and familial strategies
• Irrigation: Power and social structure
• The power of the printed word
• Possibilities in print: Play and control
• Industrialization I: The imagination of the machines
• Industrialization II: The experience of machines
• Living with the bomb
• The body and the machine
• Further reading

Readings

• Rapp, Rayna Testing women, testing the fetus: The social impact of amniocenthesis in America. New York: Routledge, 1999 (Chapters 1,2,5,6,9)

Discussion

Class notes

Cyborgs

• cyborgs: part real, part machine; are they real?
• other human-machine combinations: bluetooth headpieces, contact lenses, hearing aids, pacemakers
• people have started writing about cyborgs since the 1990s

Amniocenthesis

• gave a few of the body that wasn't available before
• impacted abortion arguments, changing people's view about when life begins
• affects questions regarding when it might be ethical (if ever) to abort a fetus (e.g. for illness)
• technology gave people new knowledge about baby's development, including decisions regarding what to do in case of illness
• medical researchers detect genes that are linked to a specific trait
• world of people confronted by pregnant woman, including possibly parents, counselors, doctors, etc.

Bodies

• Descartes infamous for arguing that we should separate our mind from our bodies
• believed that the only proof that you exist is that you think: "I think therefore I am" (Cogito, ergo sum)
• everybody thinks that we do not believe in this anymore, but this language still creeps into the language of modern scientists and engineers
• we are expected to treat the body (or parts of the body) as an object
• feminists argue against the distancing of body from soul during medical treatment
• as a patient, your status as a "human" might be gradually stripped away; you are disembodied
• you sign off your body to an institution
• contraction monitor takes the experience of labor contractions outside; everyone has access to those contractions
• a medical doctor giving birth loses that status when she is giving labor

Anthropology

• anthropologists used to be expected to be familiar with: culture, archaeology, biological development of humanity, and linguistics
• Latour closer to Boas than Geertz; interested in how tools (technologies) impact societies
• anthropologists today are more interested to make critical interpretations, postmodern and postcolonial studies
• Shirley Brice Heath continued to do ethnographies but moved to the humanities studies instead of anthropology
• Jean Lave moved to the department of geography
• geography focused more on human geographies (what people did in different parts of the world)
• Cotter: the more extensive the medical exam, the more there will be irrelevant chitchat and laughter; avoiding talk of the body part being studied

Hegemony

• what you cannot escape
• in your experience, you can be pregnant for weeks without noticing
• shift in status when you are labeled pregnant; who tells you what you can do (people will tell you to see a doctor)
• community of practice: your existence becomes caught in a certain world
• sonograms have become the next obligatory practice (e.g. family members who want pictures of the fetus)
• technology acts on the imagination
• cultural rules are arbitrary; can be used for good or bad

Politics

• shift in State's role in controlling female's bodies (allowing some forms of abortions)
• every reading of the test or image has a form and consequence
• what you do with a practice (e.g. distributing sonograms) cannot be understood only in terms of your culture
• community has to decide what comes of the practice
• those who suppose laws such as Roe vs. Wade still require the State to enforce it
• question of whether the State can limit a woman's access to information (e.g. sonograms) regarding their children

Links

• Hardacre, H. (1999) Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan. University of California Press. ISBN 0520216547. Very similar to Rapp's book, plus interesting media and religious analysis.
• Jordan, B. (1978). Birth in four cultures: A crosscultural investigation of childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States. Montreal: Eden Press Women's Publications. ISBN 088133717X
• Leroi, A. M. (2005) Mutants: On genetic variety and the human body. New York: Penguin Group. ISBN 0142004820