Description
Providing the first overview of Asia's emerging biosciences landscape, this timely and important collection brings together ethnographic case studies on biotech endeavors such as genetically modified foods in China, clinical trials in India, blood collection in Singapore and China, and stem-cell research in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. While biotech policies and projects vary by country, the contributors identify a significant trend toward state entrepreneurialism in biotechnology, and they highlight the ways that political thinking and ethical reasoning are converging around the biosciences. As ascendant nations in a region of postcolonial emergence, with an "uncanny surplus" in population and pandemics, Asian countries treat their populations as sources of opportunity and risk. Biotech enterprises are allied to efforts to overcome past humiliations and restore national identity and political ambition, and they are legitimized as solutions to national anxieties about food supplies, diseases, epidemics, and unknown biological crises in the future. Biotechnological responses to perceived risks stir deep feelings about shared fate, and they crystallize new ethical configurations, often re-inscribing traditional beliefs about ethnicity, nation, and race. As many of the essays in this collection illustrate, state involvement in biotech initiatives is driving the emergence of "biosovereignty," an increasing pressure for state control over biological resources, commercial health products, corporate behavior, and genetic based-identities. Asian Biotech offers much-needed analysis of the interplay among biotechnologies, economic growth, biosecurity, and ethical practices in Asia.
Ethnographic essays that examine the effects of biotechnology in the Asia-Pacific region, including its influence on forms of governance, economy and national identity
About the Author
Reviews
"Asian Biotech is a thoughtful examination of Asia's biotechnology development. The call to understand this realm in terms of situated ethics and communities of fate is persuasive and invites the analysis of more cases to test the robustness of these concepts." - Wen-Hua Kuo, The China Quarterly
"[W]hat bioethicists could learn from anthropological investigations like those presented in this volume is that one should consider the social and cultural contexts in which the practice to be ethically assessed is embedded in order to understand the the practice more thoroughly. And it is this more thorough understanding which will lead to a more nuanced and better refined ethical judgment." - Soraj Hongladarom, Genomics, Society, and Policy
"I for one would strongly recommend this interesting volume to anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of biotech in Asia." - Krishna Ravi Srinivas, Asian Biotech and Development Review
"[T]his book performs coverage of a region and a complicated sector of the twenty-frst-century economy, and it will certainly prove useful to those interested in globalized medicine and the fast-changing norms regulating research in biomedicine." - Thomas Cannavino, Cultural Critique
"This timely and important collection by science-studies scholars provides fascinating glimpses into the ambitious efforts of several Asian countries to deploy biotechnologies to both generate economic growth and provide biosecurity in this age of global science and technology." - Doogab Yi, Chemical Heritage
"The need in science studies and anthropology for Asian Biotech would be hard to overstate. I was hungry for this book to use in my own teaching and writing, and the meal is as satisfying as I had anticipated. The theoretical framing is astute and generative, and the well-argued and diverse essays are thoroughly fleshed out historically and ethnographically. Nancy N. Chen, Aihwa Ong, and the contributors deserve our thanks. We have just run out of excuses for ongoing Western parochialism in science and technology studies and all of our kindred inquiries into biotechnology."-Donna Haraway, author of When Species Meet
"This exciting collection of ethnographic essays introduces readers to the deployment of specific biotechnologies in Asia, revealing their enmeshment with local and global politics and a situated ethics that extends to the good of families, communities, and nations, and not merely that of individuals. This book, harbinger of impending futures, demands introspection."-Margaret Lock, author of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death
"This is the first broad anthropological examination of the biotech movement across Asia. Especially useful are the efforts at understanding how biotechnology affects (and is affected by) major changes in moral experience and ethical imagination that are roiling Asian modernities. A pathbreaking exploration! This collection will be influential."-Arthur Kleinman, Director, Asia Center, Harvard University
"Asian Biotech is a thoughtful examination of Asia's biotechnology development. The call to understand this realm in terms of situated ethics and communities of fate is persuasive and invites the analysis of more cases to test the robustness of these concepts." -- Wen-Hua Kuo * The China Quarterly *
"[T]his book performs coverage of a region and a complicated sector of the twenty-frst-century economy, and it will certainly prove useful to those interested in globalized medicine and the fast-changing norms regulating research in biomedicine." -- Thomas Cannavino * Cultural Critique *
"What bioethicists could learn from anthropological investigations like those presented in this volume is that one should consider the social and cultural contexts in which the practice to be ethically assessed is embedded in order to understand the the practice more thoroughly. And it is this more thorough understanding which will lead to a more nuanced and better refined ethical judgment." -- Soraj Hongladarom * Genomics, Society and Policy *
"I for one would strongly recommend this interesting volume to anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of biotech in Asia." -- Krishna Ravi Srinivas * Asian Biotech and Development Review *
"This timely and important collection by science-studies scholars provides fascinating glimpses into the ambitious efforts of several Asian countries to deploy biotechnologies to both generate economic growth and provide biosecurity in this age of global science and technology." -- Doogab Yi * Chemical Heritage *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822348092
Author Aihwa Ong
Format Paperback
Page Count 344
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 481g
Contributors
Vincanne Adams
Nancy N. Chen
Stefan Ecks
Kathleen Erwin
Phuoc V. Le
Jennifer Liu
Aihwa Ong
Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner
Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Wen-Ching Sung
Charis Thompson
Ara Wilson
Ethnographic essays that examine the effects of biotechnology in the Asia-Pacific region, including its influence on forms of governance, economy and national identity
About the Author
Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty and Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, both also published by Duke University Press.
Nancy N. Chen is Professor of Anthropology at Scripps College. She is the author of Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health and Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China.
Reviews
"Asian Biotech is a thoughtful examination of Asia's biotechnology development. The call to understand this realm in terms of situated ethics and communities of fate is persuasive and invites the analysis of more cases to test the robustness of these concepts." - Wen-Hua Kuo, The China Quarterly
"[W]hat bioethicists could learn from anthropological investigations like those presented in this volume is that one should consider the social and cultural contexts in which the practice to be ethically assessed is embedded in order to understand the the practice more thoroughly. And it is this more thorough understanding which will lead to a more nuanced and better refined ethical judgment." - Soraj Hongladarom, Genomics, Society, and Policy
"I for one would strongly recommend this interesting volume to anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of biotech in Asia." - Krishna Ravi Srinivas, Asian Biotech and Development Review
"[T]his book performs coverage of a region and a complicated sector of the twenty-frst-century economy, and it will certainly prove useful to those interested in globalized medicine and the fast-changing norms regulating research in biomedicine." - Thomas Cannavino, Cultural Critique
"This timely and important collection by science-studies scholars provides fascinating glimpses into the ambitious efforts of several Asian countries to deploy biotechnologies to both generate economic growth and provide biosecurity in this age of global science and technology." - Doogab Yi, Chemical Heritage
"The need in science studies and anthropology for Asian Biotech would be hard to overstate. I was hungry for this book to use in my own teaching and writing, and the meal is as satisfying as I had anticipated. The theoretical framing is astute and generative, and the well-argued and diverse essays are thoroughly fleshed out historically and ethnographically. Nancy N. Chen, Aihwa Ong, and the contributors deserve our thanks. We have just run out of excuses for ongoing Western parochialism in science and technology studies and all of our kindred inquiries into biotechnology."-Donna Haraway, author of When Species Meet
"This exciting collection of ethnographic essays introduces readers to the deployment of specific biotechnologies in Asia, revealing their enmeshment with local and global politics and a situated ethics that extends to the good of families, communities, and nations, and not merely that of individuals. This book, harbinger of impending futures, demands introspection."-Margaret Lock, author of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death
"This is the first broad anthropological examination of the biotech movement across Asia. Especially useful are the efforts at understanding how biotechnology affects (and is affected by) major changes in moral experience and ethical imagination that are roiling Asian modernities. A pathbreaking exploration! This collection will be influential."-Arthur Kleinman, Director, Asia Center, Harvard University
"Asian Biotech is a thoughtful examination of Asia's biotechnology development. The call to understand this realm in terms of situated ethics and communities of fate is persuasive and invites the analysis of more cases to test the robustness of these concepts." -- Wen-Hua Kuo * The China Quarterly *
"[T]his book performs coverage of a region and a complicated sector of the twenty-frst-century economy, and it will certainly prove useful to those interested in globalized medicine and the fast-changing norms regulating research in biomedicine." -- Thomas Cannavino * Cultural Critique *
"What bioethicists could learn from anthropological investigations like those presented in this volume is that one should consider the social and cultural contexts in which the practice to be ethically assessed is embedded in order to understand the the practice more thoroughly. And it is this more thorough understanding which will lead to a more nuanced and better refined ethical judgment." -- Soraj Hongladarom * Genomics, Society and Policy *
"I for one would strongly recommend this interesting volume to anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of biotech in Asia." -- Krishna Ravi Srinivas * Asian Biotech and Development Review *
"This timely and important collection by science-studies scholars provides fascinating glimpses into the ambitious efforts of several Asian countries to deploy biotechnologies to both generate economic growth and provide biosecurity in this age of global science and technology." -- Doogab Yi * Chemical Heritage *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822348092
Author Aihwa Ong
Format Paperback
Page Count 344
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 481g
