Lectures

September 10, 2020

Fit for Purpose? Prime Minister Johnson’s Two Bodies and the UK Better Health Strategy

This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic

Amongst the UK’s current Conservative Government, rhetorically invoking the body politic is common practice. For example, in 2019 Number 10 Special Advisor Dominic Cummings argued that a European reformist faction within the Tory party “should be treated like a metastasising tumour and excised from the UK body politic” while UK Prime Minister (PM) Boris Johnson deployed the metaphor as a …

Lectures

January 28, 2020

Provincializing Metabolism (On the Poverty of Modernism)

By Maurizio Meloni

This article is part of the series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions

According to accepted wisdom and textbooks, “metabolism” is a nineteenth-century term and concept, established at the confluence of organic chemistry, cell biology, and physiology. In Microscopical Researches (1839), Schwann spoke of the “metabolic phenomena of the cells,” using for the first time the adjective metabolische, from which “metabolic” entered the English language in the 1847 translation (Bing 1971). This standard …

Features

October 4, 2016

Juxtaposition

By Annemarie Mol

Editor: The following is an introduction to a new Japanese translation of The body multiple. It can be purchased through Suiseisha publishers, as part of their series on The Anthropological Turn.

The body multiple (Japanese translation)

In 1982/3 I spent the academic year in Paris. There I lived in the Cité Universitaire—student housing that was built in the aftermath of the …

Features

September 19, 2016

Infant Topography: Baby Body Mapping in Maphisa, Zimbabwe

By Min'enhle Ncube

This article is part of the series: The First Thousand Days of Life

Nomsa, her sixteen month old son Nathi and I met early one morning at the entrance to the open cast mine in Mafuyana, Southern Matabeleland, Zimbabwe. Nathi safely secured on her back, a shovel in one hand and a plastic bag with bread and water in the other, Nomsa hurried me along: “We must walk quickly, the earlier I start …

Features

May 4, 2016

Top of the Heap: Helen Verran

By Hannah Gibson

This article is part of the series: Top of the heap

For this installment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Helen Verran, a historian and philosopher of science who is Adjunct Professor at Charles Darwin University in Australia as well as holding a position at the Norwegian University of the Arctic.

Helen Verran

A display of a story about computer application that was never built – the …

Somatosphere

Science, Medicine, and Anthropology

A collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.

Tag Archives: the body

Fit for Purpose? Prime Minister Johnson’s Two Bodies and the UK Better Health Strategy

Provincializing Metabolism (On the Poverty of Modernism)

Juxtaposition

Infant Topography: Baby Body Mapping in Maphisa, Zimbabwe

Top of the Heap: Helen Verran

Helen Verran