Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Med Anthropol. 2012;31(3):179-95. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2011.636410.
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.
基于这样的假设，即技术实践和人工制品是个人和集体在健康和疾病中试图规范生活和身体的基本组成部分，在这篇引言中，我们提出了三个核心命题。首先，医学技术必须成为生物医学研究的核心。其次，随着医疗人工制品在全球范围内传播，它们成为社会文化挪用过程的一部分。第三，人类学家必须考虑如何研究与这种挪用相关的转变，以及他们需要了解多少关于研究对象的技术方面的知识。到目前为止，医学人类学还没有充分论述生物医学人工制品和实践的相互转化潜力以及新的应用背景——这是我们通过本文中对各种生物医学技术的反思和实证研究来弥补的一个空白。
