An Anthropology of Biomedicine

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