Panel 157: Bodies and Technologies
Panel organiser: Lynn Thomas (Univ. of Washington, USA)
Contact: lynnmt@u.washington.edu
| This panel will examine the entanglement of bodies and technologies. For more than three decades, anthropologists and historians of Africa have considered the significance of bodies in their studies of labor and production, ritual and reproduction, kinship and race, gender and sexuality, and illness and medicine. Consideration of technologies within African studies, by contrast, has been much less common. With European technological superiority routinely evoked by earlier observers and scholars as both an explanation and justification for colonialism, most Africanist historians and anthropologists from the 1970s through early 1990s shied away from studies of technology for fear of supporting technologically deterministic interpretations of Africa’s past and present. Over the past decade, however, by engaging insights from science and technology studies (STS), they have begun to analyze the material specificities of technologies, the networks through which they travel, and the unpredictable ways in which people appropriate them to shed new light on political and social processes that link Africa to the rest of the world. This panel will bring new attention to technologies into closer dialogue with the more extensive Africanist scholarship on bodies. Presenters will do so by examining sexology and genetics in South African history (Burns); the development of biopharmaceuticals in post-apartheid South Africa (Laplante); HIV/AIDS treatment in contemporary Côte d’Ivoire (Nguyen); and skin lighteners and their active ingredients in apartheid South Africa (Thomas). Keith Breckenridge is well suited to serve as discussant as his scholarship on the history of biometrics has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate analyses of bodies and technologies. |