Cultures of Biomedicine
G.14.3393
Spring, 2009
Room 612, 25 Waverly Place
Monday, 2- 4:45
Rayna Rapp
Office Hrs: Tues, Thurs
3:30-4:30 & by appt.
rr77@nyu.edu
Over the last 150 years, biomedicine as a sphere of ideas and practices has made
increasingly powerful claims to define the conditions of human life and death. In this
process, scientific authority has moved to the fore. How did medical science-as-expertise
get established? What keeps it in place, and how are contests about it mounted? How/ has
medicine-as-bioscience effaced medicine-as-healing art? This seminar will look at the
many historical processes through which biomedical power is constituted by addressing
topics such as: the discovery/invention of: standardized bodies, systems, populations;
public health and governance; the material culture of scientific medicine; and more
recently: the emergence of diagnostic categories and pharmacologies; the role of
biostatistics and other large-scale evidentiary technologies. We will also examine the
vital politics of local, national, and transnational engagements with biomedicalization:
patient and provider activist movements, UN and NGO fora dedicated to diseases and
disorders, indigenization of biomedical technologies and categories, and transnational
medical tourism.
The history, sociology, and ethnography of medicine provide rich content. Much
scholarship has been generated on Western/ cosmopolitan science and medicine, but at
least two other major analytical literatures also need to be taken into account. The first
concerns interacting civilizational and subaltern traditions drawn predominantly but not
exclusively from colonial/ post-colonial regions of the globe, many of which have
become nationally and internationally standardized, some of which have been
incorporated into their own and other national traditions. The second is the recent
activism surrounding biomedicine as a subject of human rights mobilization and policymaking across local and transnational contexts.
This course is located at the intersection where science studies and
anthropological approaches to biomedicine meet. Conceptually, our course is designed in
dialogue with Emily Martin’s seminar on science studies, fall 08. Our present course is
divided into three parts, each negotiable according to the interests of participants:
1. Toward a history and social/ cultural analysis of biomedicine: tools for
common use
2. Ethnographic encounters and insistences: how might anthropological
explorations of specific biomedical practices engage these tools, and what
new contributions might they yield?
3. Participants’ projects: sharing our work in progress
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After our first course meeting, I’ll order more books. Our readings are found in three
places:
Books for purchase at the NYU bookstore:
 John Pickstone, 2002. Ways of Knowing. Univ. Manchester Press.
 Roy Porter, Blood & Guts 2002. Penguin.
 Annemarie Mol, 2002. The Body Multiple. Duke UP.
 Monica Konrad, 2005 Narrating the New Predictive Genetics. Cambridge UP.
 Joao Biehl, 2007. Will to Live.
 Didier Fassin, 2007. When Bodies Remember. Univ. California Press.
Articles appear either in the e-database/ journals section of the library or are found in
downloadable form on our Blackboard site.
Week 1 Introduction Jan. 26
Classic background reviews:
 Sarah Franklin, 1995. “”Science as Culture, Cultures of Science” Annual Review
of Anthropology 24:163-84.
 David Hess, 1997. “If You’re Thinking of Living in STS: a guide for the
Perplexed” in Gary Downey & Joseph Dumit, eds. Cyborgs & Citadels:
Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies. Santa Fe:
School of American Research Press, pp. 143-64. BB
 Emily Martin, 1998. “Anthropology and the Cultural Study of Science”. Science,
Technology, and Human Values 23: 2-44.
 Sharon Traweek, 1993. “An Introduction to Cultural and Social Studies of
Sciences and Technologies”. Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 17: 3-25.
Week 2 Histories 2 Feb
 John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing.
 Adele Clarke et al, 2003. “Biomedicalization: Technosicientific Transformations
of Health, Illness, and US Biomedicine”, American Sociological Review 68: 161194. BB
 Robert Cook-Deagan & Michael McGeary, 2006. “The Jewel in the Federal
Crown? History, Politics, and the NIH” in Stevens, Rosenberg, and Burns, eds.
History and Health Policy in the US. Rutgers UP, pp. 176-201. BB
Week 3 Toolkits for opening up biomedicine 9 Feb
 AnneMarie Mol, The Body Multiple Duke, 2002
President’s Day, no classes 16 Feb 09 Please read or review Roy Porter, Blood &
Guts
Week 4 Numbers and Bodies Feb 23
Classics:
 Ian Hacking “How Should We Do the History of Statistics?” Ideology &
Consciousness 1976 BB
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
Talal Asad , 1994. “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics and Modern Power”.
Social Research 61: 55-89.BB
 Theodore Porter, 2002, “Life Insurance, Medical Testing, and the Management of
Mortality” in Lorraine Daston, ed. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Univ.
Chicago, pp. 226-246. BB
Thinking with numbers:
 Robert Aronowitz, “Situating Health Risks” in Stevens, Rosenberg, and Burns,
eds. History and Health Policy in the US. Rutgers UP, pp. 153-175. BB
 Foucault, Health & Medicine, Alan Petersen, “Risk, governance and the New
Public Health”, pp. 189-206. BB
 Susan Greenhalgh, 2003. “Planned Births, Unplanned Persons: ‘Population’ in
the Making of Chinese Modernity”. American Ethnologist 30 (2): 196-215.
 Wendy Chavkin, 2008. “Biology and Destiny” in Carolyn M. Elliott. Ed. Global
Empowerment of Women. (NY: Routledge), pp. 46-54 BB
Week 5 Generating diagnostic categories in context: 2 March
 Alan Young, “History, Hystery and Psychiatric Styles of Reasoning.” In Living
and working with the New Medical Technologies, BB
 Adriana Petryna, 2007. “Clinical Trials Offshored: On Private Sector Science and
Public Health”. Biosocieties 2: 21-40.
 Nicky Hart, 2008. “Making the Grade: The Gender Gap, ADHD, and the
Medicalization of Boyhood” in Rosenfeld & Faircloth, eds. Medicalizated
Masculinities. Temple UP: 132-164. BB
 Margaret Lock et al, 2007. “Susceptibility Genes and the Question of Embodied
Identity”. MAQ 21 (3) 256-276.
Week 6 Redefining Epidemics I 9 March
 Didier Fassin, When Bodies Remember
Spring Break: 16 March
Week 7 Redefining Epidemics II 30 March
 Joao Biehl, Will to Live
Week 8 Redefining Epidemics II 6 April
Psychiatrization
 Andrew Lakoff, 2004. "The Anxieties of Globalization: Antidepressant Sales and
Economic Crisis in Argentina," Social Studies of Science, 34 (2): 247-269.
 Nikolas Rose, 2006. “Disorders Without Borders? The Expanding Scope of
Psychiatric Practice” Biosocieties 1 (4) 465-484.
 “Neuro-Forum” in Biosocieties 2006 1 (1): 97-132
 Emily Martin, “The Pharmaceutical Person” Biosocieties 2006 1 (3):273-287.
Week 9 Redefining Epidemics III 13 April
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According to seminar participant’s interest
Week 10 Redefining Epidemics IV 20 April
According to seminar participant’s interest
Week 11 Technology redefining the life span 20 April
 Monica Konrad, Narrating the New Predictive Genetics
 Sherine Hamdy, 2008. “When the State and Your Kidneys Fail” American
Ethnologist 35 (4): 553-569.
 Sharon Kaufman, 2000. “In the Shadow of ‘Death with Dignity’: Medicine and
Cultural Quandaries of the Vegetative State”. Am. Anthropologist 102 (1): 69-83.
 Marcia Inhorn, 2006. “’He Won’t Be My Son’: Middle Eastern Muslim Men’s
Discourses of Adoption and Gamete Donation” Medical Anthropology Quarterly
20 (1): 94-120.
Week 12 Humanitarian/ HR medicine 27 April
Classics:
 Rene Fox, 1995 “Med Humanitarianism and HR: Reflections on Doctors Without
Borders and Doctors of the World”. Social Science & Medicine 41 (12) 16071616.
Ethnographic encounters:
 Didier Fassin, 2007 “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life”. Public Culture 19 (3)
499-520.
 Miriam Ticktin “Where ethics and politics meet: the violence of humanitarianism
in France” 2006 American Ethnologist 33 (1) 33-49.
 Bettina Shell-Duncan, 2008. “From Health to Human Rights: Female Genital
Cutting and the Politics of Intervention” American Anthropol. 110 (2): 225-236.
 Vincanne Adams, Thomas E Novotny, Hannah Leslie, 2008. “Global Health
Diplomacy”. Medical Anthropology 27 (4): 315-323.
Weeks 13 & 14: Student Seminar Presentations 4 May, double session if schedules
permit
Course requirements and evaluation:
 Keep up with assigned reading, attend all classes prepared for discussion
 Sign up twice during the semester to prepare and present original questions drawn
from assigned weekly readings. These will be used to begin class discussion.
 Research and write an original paper, with topic approval, 25-30 pages, due
Monday 11 May. Early drafts will be presented in class, 4 May
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