The legitimacy of the contemporary

Die Vorlesung des Autors enthält anthropologische Reflexionen zur Natur des Menschen und zur Legitimität der Moderne. Im Anschluss an Odo Marquards und Hans Blumenbergs Überlegungen zur Geschichtsphilosophie wird zunächst die Frage diskutiert, wie über den sozialen Wandel ohne Geschichtsphilosophie nachgedacht werden könne und wie eine Anthropologie ohne eine festgelegte Konzeption des Menschen möglich ist. Angesichts des Wandels der Biologie und der Entstehung neuer Lebenswissenschaften stellt sich ferner die Frage, welcher Logos des Bios der Gegenwart zugrundegelegt werden kann. Der Autor geht hierzu unter anderem auf die wissenschaftliche Entdeckung des "Drosophila"-Genoms im Jahr 2000 ein und erörtert die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur im Zusammenhang der Sozialphilosophie von Jürgen Habermas. Seine weiteren Reflexionen beziehen sich auf die Problemstellungen der Bioethik, auf die Frage des Humanismus in der Gegenwart, auf Sicherheit, Gefahr und Risiko in der Postmoderne sowie auf die Positionen von Niklas Luhmann zur Risikogesellschaft. (ICI

Pasos hacia un laboratorio antropológico*

The challenge is to invent new forms of inquiry, writing, and ethics for an anthropology of the contemporary. The problem is: how to rethink and remake the conditions of contemporaryknowledge production, dissemination, and critique, in the interpretive sciences? The direction forward does not include yet another attempt to have anthropology imitate a natural science model anymore than it implies a foreclosure of anthropology finding a form as a distinctive knowledge practice. Mimicry has proved to be neither prophetic of the course of disciplinary change nor empirically fruitful. It has, however, been fertile in bringing forth and fueling polemics. The twentieth century has taught us that polemics and prophecy do not lead to an exit from epistemological or ethical immaturity.El reto es inventar nuevas formas de indagación, nuevas formas de escritura y de ética para una antropología de lo contemporáneo. Y el problema es el siguiente: ¿cómo repensar y rehacer, en las ciencias interpretativas, las condiciones contemporáneas de producción de conocimientos,de diseminación y crítica? La dirección a tomar no pasará por una nueva apuesta con la cual la antropología vuelva a imitar el modelo de las ciencias naturales, ya que esto no significaría otra cosa que una claudicación en los intentos de la antropología por encontrar para ella una forma distintiva en tanto que práctica de conocimiento. Se ha constatado que la imitación ni es profética para lo que atañe al curso del cambio disciplinar ni tampoco es empíricamente fructuosa. Es cierto que ha servido para fertilizar e impulsar las polémicas. Pero el siglo XX nos ha enseñado que ni las polémicas ni la profecía nos pueden llevar a una salida de la inmadurez epistemológica o ética

Dewey and Foucault: What's the Problem?

This article explicates a valuable but undernoticed point of contact between John Dewey and Michel Foucault. Both agreed that thinking arose in the context of problems such that the work of thought for both proceeds by way of working through and working over problems. Both affirmed that thinking arose in problematic situations; that it was about clarifying those situations, and that ultimately it was directed towards achieving a degree of resolution of what was problematic in the situation. Both agreed that thinking—or inquiry—was not fundamentally about the representations of a situation; either those produced by a contemporary thinker or as an exercise directed at historical materials. Both agreed that a history of ideas as autonomous entities, distorted not only the process of thinking as a practice, but also the reasons for which it had been engaged in, often with a certain seriousness and urgency, the first place: that is to say, such approaches covered over the stakes. Both agreed that the stakes involved something experiential and entailed a form of logic (or in Foucault’s later vocabulary a mode of ‘veridiction’), in which the thinker could not help but be involved

What is a Laboratory in the Human Sciences?

ARC Working Paper No.

Synthetic biology: ethical ramifications 2009

During 2007 and 2008 synthetic biology moved from the manifesto stage to research programs. As of 2009, synthetic biology is ramifying; to ramify means to produce differentiated trajectories from previous determinations. From its inception, most of the players in synthetic biology agreed on the need for (a) rationalized design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems as well as (b) the re-design of natural biological systems for specified purposes, and that (c) the versatility of designed biological systems makes them suitable to address such challenges as renewable energy, the production of inexpensive drugs, and environmental remediation, as well as providing a catalyst for further growth of biotechnology. What is understood by these goals, however, is diverse. Those assorted understandings are currently contributing to different ramifications of synthetic biology. The Berkeley Human Practices Lab, led by Paul Rabinow, is currently devoting its efforts to documenting and analyzing these ramifications as they emerge

The Democratic Biopolitics of PrEP

PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) is a relatively new drug-based HIV prevention technique and an important means to lower the HIV risk of gay men who are especially vulnerable to HIV. From the perspective of biopolitics, PrEP inscribes itself in a larger trend of medicalization and the rise of pharmapower. This article reconstructs and evaluates contemporary literature on biopolitical theory as it applies to PrEP, by bringing it in a dialogue with a mapping of the political debate on PrEP. As PrEP changes sexual norms and subjectification, for example condom use and its meaning for gay subjectivity, it is highly contested. The article shows that the debate on PrEP can be best described with the concepts ‘sexual-somatic ethics’ and ‘democratic biopolitics’, which I develop based on the biopolitical approach of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow. In contrast, interpretations of PrEP which are following governmentality studies or Italian Theory amount to either farfetched or trivial positions on PrEP, when seen in light of the political debate. Furthermore, the article is a contribution to the scholarship on gay subjectivity, highlighting how homophobia and homonormativity haunts gay sex even in liberal environments, and how PrEP can serve as an entry point for the destigmatization of gay sexuality and transformation of gay subjectivity. ‘Biopolitical democratization’ entails making explicit how medical technology and health care relates to sexual subjectification and ethics, to strengthen the voice of (potential) PrEP users in health politics, and to renegotiate the profit and power of Big Pharma

Have we seen the geneticisation of society? Expectations and evidence

Abby Lippman’s geneticization thesis, of the early 1990s, argued and anticipated that with the rise of genetics, increasing areas of social and health related activities would come to be understood and defined in genetic terms leading to major changes in society, medicine and health care. We review the considerable literature on geneticization and consider how the concept stands both theoretically and empirically across scientific, clinical, popular and lay discourse and practice. Social science scholarship indicates that relatively little of the original claim of the geneticization thesis has been realised, highlighting the development of more complex and dynamic accounts of disease in scientific discourse and the complexity of relationships between bioscientific, clinical and lay understandings. This scholarship represents a shift in social science understandings of the processes of sociotechnical change, which have moved from rather simplistic linear models to an appreciation of disease categories as multiply understood. Despite these shifts, we argue that a genetic imaginary persists, which plays a performative role in driving investments in new gene-based developments. Understanding the enduring power of this genetic imaginary and its consequences remains a key task for the social sciences, one which treats ongoing genetic expectations and predictions in a sceptical yet open way

Mediterranean conundrums : pluridisciplinary perspectives for research in the social sciences

This paper has two purposes. First, it summarises the various papers presented at a Pluridisciplinary Conference on the Mediterranean treating the region from a variety of perspectives, a selection of which are published in this issue of History and Anthropology. Second, it attempts to explore some of the tensions between historians and anthropologists, and political scientists and geographers, in the treatment of the region.peer-reviewe