Showing papers by "Margaret Lock published in 2007"

Beyond the body proper : reading the anthropology of material life

Abstract: An emergent canon, or putting bodies on the scholarly agenda -- Introduction -- Friedrich Engels on the part played by labor in the transition from ape to man / Robert Hertz -- The pre-eminence of the right hand / Marcel Granet --Right and left in China / Marcel Mauss -- Techniques of the body / Victor Turner --Symbols in Ndembu ritual / Terence Turner -- The social skin -- Philosophical studies, or learning how to think embodiment -- Introduction -- Karl Marx and opposition of the materialist and idealist outlook / Friedrich Engels -- Walter Benjamin on the mimetic faculty / Maurice Merleau-Ponty -- From the phenomenology of perception / Ian Hacking -- Making up people / Judith Butler -- From bodies that matter / Bruno Latour -- Do you believe in reality? -- Fundamental processes, or denaturalizing the given -- Introduction / E. E. Evans-Pritchard -- Time and space / Caroline WalK Bynum -- Women mystics and eucharistic devotion in the thirteenth century / Kristofer M. Schipper --^

Susceptibility genes and the question of embodied identity.

Abstract: Drawing on an assumption of the co-construction of the material and the social, late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) is used as an illustrative example to assess claims for an emergent figure of the “individual genetically at risk.” Current medical understanding of the genetics of AD is discussed, followed by a summary of media and AD society materials that reveal an absence of gene hype in connection with this disease. Excerpts from interviews with first-degree relatives of patients diagnosed with AD follow. Interviewees hold complex theories of causation. After genetic testing they exhibit few if any subjective changes in embodied identity or lifestyle. Family history is regarded by interviewees as a better indicator of future disease than is genetic testing. We argue that, even when molecular genetics are better understood, predictions about complex disease based on genotyping will be fraught with uncertainty, making problematic the concept of individuals as genetically at risk when applied to late-onset complex disease.

The future is now: Locating biomarkers for dementia

Abstract: The molecular vision of life that predominated during the second half of the twentieth century, culminating recently in the mapping of the human genome, is grounded in a mechanistic biology, one primary objective of which is to enable the engineering of bodies and minds (Kay 1993: 17). This particular form of molecularization is deterministic, one assumption being that knowledge about specifi c genes makes possible reliable predictions about the occurrence of disease. As part of this endeavor, technological innovations since the mid-1980s have facilitated the genetic testing and screening of individuals, with both negative and positive consequences (Duster 1990; Kitcher 1996). However, this particular form of molecular biology, although its approach remains valid for single-gene disorders, shows many signs of being on the wane. Theorizing and research into susceptibility genes1 implicated in complex diseases and behaviors have brought about a fundamental transformation in molecular biology, on the order of a paradigm shift, with enormous potential consequences for clinical care of all kinds, including the genetic testing of individuals.