240089 SE Material Culture of/in Biomedicine (P4) (2015S)

The last decades have seen a remarkable advance of biotechnologies in biomedicine that have entered the global health markets. These have not only boosted medical knowledge and therapeutic interventions and consequently fuelled promises for health and wellbeing. In locally specific ways they have also profoundly shaped current understandings and practices of health and illness, fostered new social forms and influenced how individuals position and experience themselves in relation to each other, to their bodies and their life worlds more generally. Thus, biomedical technologies and the material culture of/in biomedicine in general is key for an understanding of biomedical practices and reasoning and how we understand and experience ourselves and our worlds.

This course deals with the entanglements of medical technologies, objects and substances, bodies and people from an anthropological point of view. It introduces students to relevant approaches and analytical concepts that have been developed in medical anthropology and other disciplines. On the basis of empirical examples and case studies from around the world we explore in more detail exemplary key medical technologies. These include new pharmaceuticals, organ transplantation, assisted reproductive technologies and predictive genetic testing.