Biomedical Techniques in Context: On the Appropriation of Biomedical Procedures and Artifacts

Abstract

On the assumption that technical practices and artifacts are fundamental constituents of individual and collective attempts to order lives and bodies in health and sickness, in this introduction, we set out three central propositions. First, medical techniques have to take center stage in research on biomedicine. Second, as medical artifacts travel worldwide, they become part of the processes of sociocultural appropriation. Third, anthropologists have to consider how to study the transformations associated with such appropriation and how much they need to know about the technical aspects of their objects of study. The mutual transformative potential of both biomedical artifacts and practices and the new contexts of application have so far been undertheorized in medical anthropology—a gap that we aim to close with our reflections and the collection of empirical studies of various biomedical techniques in this issue.

Keywords:

• appropriation
• global health
• medical artifacts
• medical technology
• technology transfer

Notes

In the United States, Science, Society, and Technology Studies are commonly abbreviated as STS, in Europe the term SSTS is more often used. We therefore refer to this field as SSTS/STS.

We organized the panel on behalf of the Work Group Medical Anthropology at the biennial conference of the German Association of Anthropology 2009, which took place in Frankfurt.

Pfaffenberger here, however, draws on ideas of Thomas Hughes (1991) and other authors inspired by Actor-Network-Theory.

Whyte and Ingstad (2007), for example, follow such an approach by comparing divination techniques to modern biomedical counseling techniques in the field of HIV/AIDS.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bernhard Hadolt

BERNHARD HADOLT, PhD, MA, MSc, is Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria. His research interests include reproduction and assisted reproductive technologies, and more recently new genetics and predictive genetic testing. VIOLA HÖRBST, Dr. rer. nat. in anthropology, is currently investigator at the Center for African and Brazilian Studies at the Technical University of Lisbon (CEAB-ISCSP-UTL), Portugal. Her research covers pharmaceutical markets, technology transfer, assisted reproductive technologies, and associated processes of transnationalization in West and East Africa. BABETTE MÜLLER-ROCKSTROH, PhD, MA, midwife, has been working on reproductive health both in academic and non-academic settings for over a decade. Her research focuses on health care technology transfer to Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, on transfer of imaging technology to Ghana and Tanzania (see also this issue), on antiretroviral drugs in the wake of transferring prevention concepts for pregnant women (current project), and on transfer of nursing/midwifery classification systems (project in planning).