Description
Sunder Rajan's ethnography informs his theoretically sophisticated inquiry into how the contemporary world is shaped by the marriage of biotechnology and market forces, by what he calls technoscientific capitalism. Bringing Marxian theories of value into conversation with Foucaultian notions of biopolitics, he traces how the life sciences came to be significant producers of both economic and epistemic value in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.
An argument that contemporary biotechnologies such as genomics can only be understood in relation to the economic markets within which they emerge
About the Author
Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.
Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of BIOCAPITAL: THE CONSTITUTION OF POSTGENOMIC LIFE (2006).
Reviews
"Biocapital is an ambitious book; its conceptual scope has the potential to remake conversation in the human sciences. There is really nothing like the argument and synthesis Kaushik Sunder Rajan provides, which is surprising given how important his topic is."-Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things
"Biocapital is excellent. It offers new insight into both late capitalism and the life sciences and also provides material and arguments for rethinking foundational concepts such as 'valuation' and 'exchange.'"-Kim Fortun, author of Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders
"Reading Kaushik Sunder Rajan's Biocapital fills me with the same intellectual and personal excitement I felt reading Marx's Capital and Foucault's History of Sexuality for the first time. Biocapital gives a passionate, thoroughly argued road map to dense and consequential worlds that I already inhabit, but have not known how to describe with the vividness and acumen required. Sunder Rajan integrates and explores in depth what many others only promise; i.e., the coproductions of meanings, values, and bodies in emerging regimes of biocapital. In the course of shaping ethnographic and theoretical inquiry into what he calls 'lively capital,' Sunder Rajan gives his readers lively value in every sense."-Donna Haraway, author of Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan (c)_Meets_OncoMouse (TM)
"Biocapital has more than enough interesting verifiable claims to make it essential reading for anyone studying biotechnology and other contemporary hype-driven fields like nanotechnology and alternative energy." -- Joseph November * ISIS *
"Biocapital presents an intriguing analysis of the bioscience industry, especially the capitalist imperatives behind technological developments. . . . Thus for the bioethics audience it presents an engaging study of the biosciences both in relation to the presentation and valuation of ethics and the interdependence of science and markets." -- Kean Birch * American Journal of Bioethics *
"Biocapital is a deft, complex, and carefully argued work." -- Cori Hayden * American Anthropologist *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822337201
Author Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Format Paperback
Page Count 360
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 513g