Assistant Professor Of Anthropology Research Articles

The persistence of HIV stigma in Kenya

Through a collection of contextual anecdotal evidence and diligent examination, Viral frictions: global health and the persistence of HIV stigma in Kenya, written by Elizabeth J Pfeiffer carefully analyses the ongoing stigma that persists around HIV and AIDS in Kenya—specifically through a decade of research (2010–19) in a small town called Mahali. Pfeiffer is an Assistant Professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College (Providence, RI, USA) who specialises in medical anthropology, global health, and African studies. In her previous work, The cultural politics of secrecy during HIV home counselling and testing campaigns in Kenya (2021), she ethnographically investigated how biomedical and institutionalised global health knowledge and management of HIV overlap with the local cultural politics of secrecy in Kenya. She continues to explore this concept further in Viral frictions.

Review: The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California, by Tsim D. Schneider

Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California, by Tsim D. Schneider Tsim D. Schneider. The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021. 216 pp. Paperback $30.00. Terri A. Castaneda Terri A. Castaneda TERRI A. CASTANEDA is a professor of anthropology at California State University, Sacramento, and the author of Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian Activist (2020). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2022) 99 (3): 66–68. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.3.66 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Terri A. Castaneda; Review: The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California, by Tsim D. Schneider. California History 1 August 2022; 99 (3): 66–68. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.3.66 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search At long last, a narrative of colonial California populated with intelligent and culturally resourceful Indigenous people has arrived. Replete with earthquakes, shipwrecks, and Coast Miwok salvaging copper hulls and timber frames from hulking maritime vessels washed up on their foggy shores, it is certainly a page-turner. The book opens dramatically in 1783 as a young couple, Julúio and Olomojoia, with their six-year-old daughter in tow, strike out in a tule balsa to investigate the Spanish colonial settlement across the bay from their homeland in present-day Sausalito. They would repeat this crossing many times in the coming year as they ascertained how best to secure their family’s future in a rapidly changing world. Two centuries later, Tsim D. Schneider, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, embarked on a journey not unlike that of his Coast Miwok forebears. For two decades, he has traversed his ancestral homelands... You do not currently have access to this content.

Dispirited Away: The Peer Review Process

Dispirited Away: The Peer Review Process

The Ch'orti' Project Collaboration

Dr. Robin Quizar and Dr. Rich Sandoval are both alumni of CU Boulder Linguistics, and they are both affiliated with Metropolitan State University of Denver, Robin as Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Rich as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Together they run a language documentation effort called the Ch’orti’ Project, of which Robin is the director. Robin worked extensively with the Ch’orti’ (Mayan) language and community in Guatemala throughout the 1970s and 80s, helping to produce a number of language reference and revitalization materials. After retiring from MSU Denver, Robin renewed this research, reconnected with the Ch’orti’ community, and founded the Ch’orti’ Project in 2013 as a collaborative effort with MSU Denver’s Ethnography Lab. Rich joined the project in 2017. Given his background in linguistic anthropology, language documentation, and other relevant linguistics subfields, Rich was a good fit to help Robin run the project. The project’s accomplishments over the years are in large part due to the work of student assistants from the Ethnography Lab. One of the main goals of the project is to give these anthropology and linguistics undergraduate students real-world experience as well as the opportunity to develop a variety of practical and technological skills. The project has also involved other collaborators, including other scholar/researchers. Because a primary focus of the Ch’orti’ Project is to support the Ch’orti’ community’s own language revitalization efforts, including the reclamation of the Classic Mayan writing system, the project has undertaken a number of trips to the Ch’orti’ communities of Guatemala and Honduras in order to learn about these efforts, conduct research, and otherwise develop community relationships. The essay elaborates on Robin, Rich, and other collaborators’ work with respect to these project activities and goals. It also provides background on Ch’orti’ language revitalization efforts, general Ch’orti’ language scholarship, and Robin’s contributions to both.

The Politics of Vietnamese Craft

Review Article| May 29 2020 The Politics of Vietnamese Craft: American Diplomacy and Domestication Jennifer Way, Jennifer Way Jennifer Way is a professor of art history at the University of North Texas. Her research and teaching explore the social meanings and uses people make of visual art, craft, design, material culture, and exhibitions, emphasizing the period since the mid twentieth century. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Sarah Grant Sarah Grant Sarah Grant is Multimedia Editor of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies and Assistant Professor of anthropology at California State University, Fullerton. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2020) 15 (2): 152–160. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2020.15.2.152 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Way, Sarah Grant; The Politics of Vietnamese Craft: American Diplomacy and Domestication. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 29 May 2020; 15 (2): 152–160. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2020.15.2.152 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Vietnamese Studies Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Book Review: Beauty around the World: A Cultural Encyclopedia

Kenny is an assistant professor of anthropology at Missouri State University with research experience in East and West Africa. Nichols is a professor of Spanish at Drury University with her research specializing in cultures of Latin America. Nichols has also co-written Pop Culture in Latin American and the Caribbean (ABC-CLIO, 2015) and authored a chapter on beauty in Venezuela for the book The Body Beautiful? Identity, Performance, Fashion and the Contemporary Female Body (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2015). Both authors have taught extensively on the topic of beauty and bodies (xi).

Webs of Kinship: Family in Northern Cheyenne Nationhood

Christina Gish Hill, an assistant professor of anthropology at Iowa State University, has written a convincing narrative analysis of the meaning of Northern Cheyenne “nationhood.” Her thesis is that “kinship ties” to one another, to peoples of other native nations (especially the Lakota), and to the land are far better determinants of nationhood than concepts of the nation-state (p. 9). Throughout Northern Cheyennes' wars, suffering, and attempts to have homelands recognized by the United States, and today, through their efforts to achieve sovereignty, “family” has been more important than visions of leaders in keeping the people unified as a nation. Although kinship forms important connectives to the land and the natural world, geographical delineations are, at best, secondary to kinship. As Hill asserts, “the Cheyennes' relationship with their landscape has always been more than economic or political” (p. 85). Family kinship has ordered not only social but also economic and political life for the Northern Cheyennes. These kinship webs strengthen avenues of self-determinism today.

Reverse Ethnography and the Recovery of Indigenous Anthropological Ancestors

Reverse Ethnography and the Recovery of Indigenous Anthropological Ancestors Richard Handler Margaret M. Bruchac, Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. 280 pp. They've got a lot of stuff there, but they don't know much about it. Staff member at a Kwagiulth tribal center, referring to the University of British Columbia Anthropology Museum (as quoted in Clifford 1997:122) Margaret M. Bruchac begins Savage Kin with a meditation on the naming, or re-naming, practices of settler societies that allowed anthropologists and other authorities to assert control over knowledge about indigenous peoples on the North American continent. If those peoples' ethnonyms could be replaced by generic terms like "savage," "primitive," and "Indian," then it made sense, from the anthropologists' perspective, to treat such people as objects of knowledge but not as subjects capable of producing their own knowledge about the world and about themselves. Their "myths" became anthropologists' facts—social facts about savages, not historical facts about a collective past or cosmological facts about the world. And yet, to "collect" such facts, and the artifacts through [End Page 1119] which they were represented, anthropologists had to work with their "savage kin," their Indigenous interlocutors, who had their own reasons for translating knowledge about their worlds into terms anthropologists could understand. In Savage Kin, Bruchac, who is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, dissects the social and historical processes through which Americanist anthropologists constructed their scientific authority. They did this by collecting Indigenous artifacts and knowledge, and then working to control the stories the collected materials could be used to tell about Indigenous peoples in museums and publications. Savage Kin is a brilliant first step in reversing that process, as Bruchac works backward from museum objects and the archival documentation associated with them to recover some of the hitherto lost stories of how those objects were detached from Indigenous cultural contexts and drafted into service in a quite different context. The book that has resulted from such a research procedure is both a collection of fascinating tales about anthropological ancestors and a theoretical and methodological treatise that is challenging in the best sense of the word: it demands that we rethink our assumptions. Chapters 2–6 of this 8-chapter book trace new histories of North Americanist anthropologists and their savage kin—anthropologist-collectors and the Indigenous "informants" and "assistants" who were far more central to the work of knowledge-creation than such terms suggest. These chapters are bracketed by introductory chapters and a conclusion in which Bruchac describes a research program she calls reverse ethnography (19). When she began looking for "materials that might document Indigenous commentary" on "early anthropological encounters" (177), she did not know what to expect; but, to her surprise, she discovered a wealth of documents—letters, field notes, and publications. Yet, those documents had been hidden through an organized disorderliness she calls cataloging erasures (177). Most white collectors, anthropologists, and museum curators considered collected objects to be theirs (either the property of the institution for which they worked or their personal private property), just as they considered the work of collection and research to be theirs. Their Indigenous collaborators—especially those who were women—were written out of the record. [End Page 1120] To maintain such fictions, white collectors treated much of the documentation relevant to museum objects so cavalierly that something like Bruchac's reverse ethnography is necessary to restore the record. Documents were "detached" (sometimes willfully) from objects (17) and "scattered" (177) among multiple museums, archives, and caches of personal papers. Documents were also detached from their creators in the sense that the writings of Indigenous collaborators were absorbed into the archives of white anthropologists and then "concealed by indexing processes that identified them as works by their non-Native collaborators" (177). For example, in Bruchac's chapter on Franz Boas (1858–1942) and George Hunt (1854–1933), we learn not only how Boas relied on Hunt—who by now is well-known in the history of anthropology—but how Hunt relied on the women of his household, who have been historically invisible. In...

The Lives of Community Health Workers: Local Labor and Global Health in Urban Ethiopia by Kenneth Maes

Reviewed by: The Lives of Community Health Workers: Local Labor and Global Health in Urban Ethiopia by Kenneth Maes Henry B. Perry Kenneth Maes. The Lives of Community Health Workers: Local Labor and Global Health in Urban Ethiopia. New York: Routledge, 2017. xv + 171 pp. Ill. $44.95 (978-1-61132-361-0). National experiences with community health workers (CHWs) and evidence about their effectiveness in improving the health of populations is growing rapidly throughout the world—from the prototype of the first CHW cadre using “farmer scholars” in China in the 1930s at Ding Xian,1 to the current state of affairs where there are now more than five million CHWs providing basic and essential health care services around the world, including in the United States.2 CHWs are now [End Page 228] widely recognized as a critical resource for enabling health systems to more effectively improve the health of the populations they serve and to reduce health inequities, especially in underserved geographic areas.3 The evidence—that CHWs can save lives through promoting healthy household behaviors and good nutrition, linking families to important preventive services such as immunizations, recognizing danger signs for which treatment should be sought, providing treatment for life-threatening illnesses (such as HIV/AIDS and childhood pneumonia, the leading single cause of child death globally), and accompanying patients to health facilities for emergency care—has been rapidly accumulating during the past two decades. New evidence will certainly continue to accumulate on the effectiveness of CHWs in disease surveillance (to detect outbreaks of Ebola and other serious highly contagious diseases), in ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic and providing ongoing treatment to infected patients, in controlling tuberculosis and malaria, and in detecting and treating important emerging noncommunicable diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and mental illness throughout the world.4 Kenneth Maes’s new book makes an important contribution to a void in the literature on CHWs—studies of CHWs themselves as people and of their perspectives on their work. Maes, an assistant professor of anthropology at Oregon State University, has carried out extensive field research exploring the lives and social dynamics of CHWs in Ethiopia, particularly as they relate to the broader health system as well as to the local, national, and global social/political context, including the “global health industry” (p. 7), as he repeatedly refers to it throughout his book. This book focuses on his field research in Addis Ababa during the period from 2006 to 2008 when he conducted longitudinal in-depth interviews with CHW volunteers who were working in HIV/AIDS programs funded by external donors to detect persons with HIV/AIDS, to enroll them in a program providing them with medication, and to provide social support to them once enrolled. A major theme of the book is what Maes sees as the exploitation of CHWs—by the “global health industry,” by not providing them with a living wage, and by not giving them a seat at the table in decisions about health systems strengthening. But his book also provides a rich in-depth description of the social and political context of Ethiopia over the past half century and its efforts to address the health needs of its population through “abyotawi (revolutionary) development” (p. 51)—a hybrid approach to development that “promotes privatization and markets to some extent while maintaining relatively strong state control over the economy, social organization, and the health care system” (p. 51). And, his book [End Page 229] provides a useful link to broader efforts around the world by social scientists to understand the perspectives of CHWs and how engaging them in defining and improving their work can lead to an even more effective CHW workforce. This book is a call for more research on CHWs, particularly from an anthropological and social science perspective. But more importantly, it is also a call to engage CHWs in the research process and to foster coalitions that include CHWs, social scientists, public health experts, and policy makers to form a “spider’s web” (p. 147), as he refers to it (relying on an Ethiopian proverb), that can “tie up a lion” (p. 147). Here, the “lion” is global health inequity and the...

(Re)Politicizing The Anthropologist In The Age Of Neoliberalism And #Blacklivesmatter

AbstractIn the larger context of overwhelming student loans and the decline of tenure, universities are now commonly dealing with racial protests. Beyond contributing service to what Sara Ahmed describes as the “non‐performativity” of diversity statements, scholars are expected to follow the precedent set by university administration, which is usually one of silence and denial punctuated by vociferous apology through targeted resignations post‐incident. Although race has long been a dominant research theme, anthropologists are rarely asked by administration to facilitate debate on the role of the academic setting in creating social and political change. This article explores the responses of universities coupled with the purposeful exclusion of anthropologists and other social scientists from administrative committees and policy decisions. Assuming Louis Althusser's theory of the ideological state apparatus, we examine the ways university bureaucracies have propagated neoliberal ideas and strategies for achieving racial equality and how the strategies utilized by the university are dictated by its funding needs. Specific examples draw from the experiences and observations of the authors—an assistant professor of anthropology and a community organizer–graduate student—juxtaposing the responses of two local university administrations to protests in Ferguson, as well as detailing nonproductive attempts of these campus communities to engage structural racism and the Ferguson community.

Pernicious Effects of Racism Discussed in Session Honoring Chester Pierce, M.D.

Pernicious Effects of Racism Discussed in Session Honoring Chester Pierce, M.D.

Addictive Drugs and Treatments Said to Have Racial Component

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Professional NewsFull AccessAddictive Drugs and Treatments Said to Have Racial ComponentAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:17 Jul 2017https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2017.7a7AbstractNow and in the past, drugs of abuse and the treatment of people with substance use disorder carry an often unspoken dimension of race.“Pharmaceutical whiteness” asserts itself in the racially divergent ways that American society perceives and uses opioids and other drugs, said Helena Hansen, M.D., Ph.D., at APA’s 2017 Annual Meeting in San Diego. Both drugs of abuse and their treatments can be divided by race.Helena Hansen, M.D., Ph.D., notes that the public health potential of buprenorphine is limited by racial segregation and a commercially driven health care system.David HathcoxHansen spoke at a Presidential Symposium honoring the late Chester Pierce, M.D., which addressed the intersection of race and psychiatry (see story on page 1).The racialization of narcotics is evident when illegal drugs like heroin are associated with poor black or Latino people, while legal, prescription opioids and their treatments are marketed to whites, argued Hansen, an assistant professor of anthropology and psychiatry at New York University. Analogously, in the 1950s, marijuana was an illegal street drug used by minorities while Valium was marketed as “mother’s little helper” to middle-class suburban housewives with access to physicians.Of course, not all users of prescription drugs are white, nor are all heroin users or cannabis smokers members of minority groups, but Hansen made a case for the different ways the drugs, their users, and their treatment are racially divided in the medical and legal realms.This difference became even more acute in recent decades, first with racial disparities in sentencing in the 1970s and for cocaine possession and trafficking in the 1980s. Crack cocaine—associated with inner-city blacks—drew drastically longer sentences than the powdered variant, which was seen as a glamorous drug for whites. In the 1990s, promotion of pain as the “fifth vital sign” and heavy commercial marketing of oxycodone led to the take-off of those prescription medications as drugs of abuse.“The puzzle is that we saw increasing white opioid use in the midst of an intensified inner-city drug war,” said Hansen. “We have a clinical track for whites and a criminal track for the rest.”Yet this nominal advantage for white people is also costly for them, she said. “White people pay more money for patented drugs, and some pay again with their lives when they overdose.”Even the recategorization of addiction as a “chronic, relapsing, brain disease” only enhanced the social stratification of addiction, said Hansen. Ironically, the scientists involved wanted to counteract the punitive drug-war mentality by erasing the social and racial foundations of drug use.“An image of a brain scan takes gender, race, and class out of the picture, but that implies a white norm,” she said. “It only whitened opioids by molecular means.”Furthermore, the treatments for drug abuse and addiction present divided racial identities. Methadone was “a poor fit for the suburban spread of narcotic addiction,” Hansen said, quoting a former NIDA director. Thus methadone is handed out to a stigmatized population under tightly controlled conditions at clinics set in marginal neighborhoods. High-priced, on-patent buprenorphine, however, is marketed for a “new kind of addict” (that is, implicitly white and insured) and is dispensed in private physicians’ offices in the suburbs.Such an approach for buprenorphine was not inevitable and may have been counterproductive, she said. Overdose rates in France—a country with a national health system, she noted—dropped 80 percent in the first four years after buprenorphine was introduced for all addicts, while overdoses in the U.S. have quadrupled in the first 10 years after approval.“The public health potential of buprenorphine is limited by our racially segregated and commercially driven health care system, which orphans patients with patchy insurance coverage and tenuous access to providers,” she said. “We could use the current despair over white opioid deaths to build a case for a less market-driven health care system and adopt a more public health and social determinants–based approach to both white and non-white patients.” ■ ISSUES NewArchived

Contributors

Other| July 01 2017 Contributors Small Axe (2017) 21 (2 (53)): 209–211. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-4156942 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Small Axe 1 July 2017; 21 (2 (53)): 209–211. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-4156942 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSmall Axe Search Advanced Search Greg Beckett is an assistant professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College. He has published articles in Small Axe, the Journal of Haitian Studies, American Anthropologist, Social and Economic Studies, Reviews in Anthropology, and PoLAR. His main areas of interest are political theory, existential anthropology, and the history of ideas. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the lived experience of crisis in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.Yarimar Bonilla is an associate professor in the departments of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Anthropology at Rutgers University. She specializes in social movements, colonial legacies, and questions of race, sovereignty, and citizenship across the Americas. She is the author of Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015) and is currently completing a second monograph on the politics of annexation in Puerto Rico.Chenee Daley, the second-place winner of the 2016... Issue Section: Contributors You do not currently have access to this content.

A Conversation with Ericka Huggins

236 Feminist Studies 42, no. 1. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Lisa Rofel and Jeremy Tai A Conversation with Ericka Huggins This interview with Ericka Huggins, a former member of the Black Panther Party, was conducted in May 2015 by Lisa Rofel, a member of the Feminist Studies editorial collective.1 This interview is abridged for purposes of space. Huggins requested that we not review parts of her life that have been well documented elsewhere. One of the most detailed and illuminating previous interviews, conducted by Fiona Thompson, can be found in the Oral History Archives at the University of California Berkeley. Additionally, Huggins coauthored an essay with Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest about the Black Panther Party’s Oakland community school, where she had been a long-time leader, “Revolutionary Women, Revolutionary Education: The Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School,” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed., Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (2009). The question that prompted this first response was about the use of academic language in teaching and writing. Ericka Huggins: I’m not allergic to the language. However, there’s a way to use just enough that people know where you’re coming from. I went into education because I grew up in Washington, DC, where access to quality education was a joke. That’s why I wanted to become a teacher. . . . I lived in Southeast DC, where, if you were black or brown, you just weren’t going to have access to books even, and much less teachers who really cared about you. I don’t have a grudge. 1. The interview was transcribed and edited by Jeremy Tai, an assistant professor of anthropology at McGill University. Lisa Rofel and Jeremy Tai 237 I moved to Pennsylvania to go to college to become a teacher, and I saw the same thing in the rural village where I tutored English and writing . That wasn’t DC: that was rural Pennsylvania. And then I went to New York. Same thing. Later, when I joined the Black Panther Party, in California, I realized that some of the young party members could not read. They were great minds, yet they had not been taught. I was nineteen. Tommy Smith was a brilliant seventeen year old. One day when we were reading Mao Zedong’s Red Book, I found out how he couldn’t read. He could memorize everything. He admitted this to me quietly. So I taught him how to read. Huey [Newton] made statements that were so simple. Huey did not learn how to read until he was sixteen. He thought there was no reason for [reading], it was bullshit. Until one day a teacher said to Huey, “You’re not going to become anything. You know, you should just take up a trade.” His brother taught him to read. This is still said to people today. Look at the books Huey wrote. What if he had believed that he didn’t have any intellectual capacity? What if he believed that? What if I had believed that? I think as we get entrenched in the academy, we [forget] our original , inspired purpose. Lisa Rofel: You used two terms I wanted to ask you to say a little more about. One was transformative education. The other is revolutionary thinking. So if you could talk about those two terms. EH: I don’t believe that human beings in a classroom at any age—I don’t care what age they are, three years old, five years—I don’t believe they are empty vessels, and I am going to walk in there, like, you know, knower of the universe and drop gems into that vessel. No need to intend to think of myself as knowing everything. I don’t. So transformative learning for me is that which occurs in a learning environment where the facilitator of the learning—me as an example or you as an example—is learning as much as the students. So I am facilitating that learning. Okay, they came there because they wanted to know about how the Black Panther Party provided strategies for organizing the people...

Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise by Nicolas Rasmussen

Reviewed by: Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise by Nicolas Rasmussen Lyle Fearnley (bio) Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise. By Nicolas Rasmussen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. viii+ 264. $35. The rise of biotechnology is a history told many times over, and told in both celebratory and dismissive, comic and tragic modes. Did biotech revolutionize the life sciences and create new tools for curing disease and producing value? Or was science essentially corrupted by its submission to venture capital and market forms of value assessment? In Gene Jockeys, Nicolas Rasmussen, like a handicapper, aims for an even race between the goods and evils of biotech. On the one hand, he argues that biotech firms offered an environment that was not radically opposed to the norms of the academy—“quasi-academic,” as he phrases it (p. 184). Above all, the biotech firms encouraged the publication of scientific papers: to keep scientist employees satisfied, to keep in touch with broader research fields, and above all, to further hype the reputation of the firm. Here Rasmussen gives too much weight to the rather unsurprising fact that scientists working in industry remained concerned with scientific credit, and he fails to identify the significant mutations of vocation and ethos that Paul Rabinow and others uncovered in the biotech milieu (Making PCR, 1996). On the other hand, Rasmussen suggests that despite the truly innovative work of scientists in the biotech sector, much of the value that they produced was—to cite one of his favored metaphors—“low-hanging fruit.” Decades of publicly funded university research during the cold war had left an archive of scientific knowledge that was quickly mined for patentable molecules. For Rasmussen, an “overgenerous” (p. 4) intellectual property regime enabled a few well-placed individuals to profit from the accumulated results of public research. This concept leads to Rasmussen’s most provocative claim, laid out in his conclusion. “We can never again expect the measure of business success so far recorded”: Any efforts to reproduce the remarkable, creative atmosphere of the first two decades when molecular biology met the business world—dependent as it was on the conjunction of ephemeral conditions in science, culture, law, and business—would be as futile as capturing a breaking wave in a bottle (p. 191). As I write from Singapore, where the government is furiously attempting to turn the tropical city-state into a biotech hub, the implications of this claim, if true, are extraordinary. Indeed, Singapore’s $500 million Biopolis could be a very costly incarnation of this bottle set out to catch the breakers. Mostly, however, Rasmussen’s Gene Jockeys eschews historical judgment for pace: thoroughbred pace. The titular metaphor aptly captures the tone and mood of the book’s narrative, which gallops from the 1920s [End Page 700] through to the 1990s in a breakneck 180 pages. Individuals, firms, events, methods, technologies appear and disappear as the story races by. As a result, despite Rasmussen’s occasional allusion to the concepts and approaches from anthropology or sociology of science, the work lacks the careful attention to the displacement of “epistemic things” (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger) that characterizes the best laboratory histories and ethnographies. Lyle Fearnley Lyle Fearnley is assistant professor of anthropology at Singapore University of Technology and Design. Copyright © 2016 Society for the History of Technology

The Global Dreams and Local Complexities of Malaria Eradication

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsSvea ClosserSvea Closser is assistant professor of anthropology at Middlebury College. Her book, Chasing Polio in Pakistan, is an ethnography of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

Food Science Education Publications and Websites

Food Science Education Publications and Websites

Psychiatrist-Anthropologist Studies Drug Addiction and Recovery

Psychiatrist-Anthropologist Studies Drug Addiction and Recovery

The Criminalization of African American Males

"The Criminalization of African American Males." NACLA Report on the Americas, 47(2), pp. 42–43 Additional informationNotes on contributorsNicole FabricantNicole Fabricant is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Towson University, a member of NACLA’s editorial committee, and author of Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle Over Land (UNC Press 2012).