Customer Reviews

Remaking Life & Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series)

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<A highly interesting book on a very important topic. The biomedical sciences increasingly transgress traditional and hence largely intuitive borders of personhood, of being alife, or of what is destiny or where man can intervene. All this creates pressing social, political and giuridical challenges. Yet, most decision-makers become aware of these problems only when specific cases emerge.
The book focuses on the transformation of our concepts of life and death, revealing an unexpected variety and complexity of approaches, results and implications. Though written nearly exclusively by anthropologists - as the subtitle clearly indicates -, many of them favouring constructivist conceptions of science, the authors resisted the temptation which characterized so many analyses of the past decades, to simply condemn the natural sciences as something awful that should be stopped or controlled as much as possible. Instead, most essays greatly illuminate the grey areas between recent scientific research and the sociopolitical questions that arise, and are thus interesting for all people touching it.