SELF OR NON-SELF? CONSTRUCTING THE BODY IN IMMUNOLOGY

Abstract

The article focusses on how the body is constructed for immunology. Specifically, the complex and tangled bio-political genealogy of immunity is analysed in detail as the understanding of it hovers between social and biological discourses. In addition, the controversy between different models of the immune system is examined. The social studies of immunology conducted by Donna Haraway and Emily Martin are also highlighted. In these studies, the body-immune system is understood as a diversified heterogeneous construction consisting of components belonging to different ontological orders. The construction of the immune system does not end in the labora-tory or in the clinic. It continues in other places by other means. Nevertheless, the relationship between the body and the immune system is situational: the immune system could be completely identified with the body or be a part of it. Emily Martin’s ethnography of immune systems and Donna Haraway’s feminist anthropology provide the means for understanding how the immune system, as both academics and non-academics explain it, can be juxtaposed to and also coincide with the body and even the self,but nevertheless conform to the scale, concepts, laws and metaphors of the social world of everyday life. The immune system and immunity are assessed in terms of the physiological body and the self. On the other hand, the body as a biological “self” is abstracted from the physiological and social body, and in a sense it “lives a life of its own.” Therefore, our body is the outcome of a complex coordinating effort among different bodies: the physiological body, the one identified with the self, and the body on a different scale - the biological “self” which turns out to be “non-self” and not belong to the subject