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Article Excerpt
IN THE SPRING OF 2003, the Halifax meeting of the CSAA (now CSA) saw its first session on "Genes and Society." Since then, the session has not only become a regular annual feature of these meetings, but participation has grown exponentially. Gone are the days of soliciting (begging) colleagues and friends to present ("we just need three people--please!"); the last two meetings have seen double sessions, packed both with papers and new and old attendees.
That 2003 meeting was fateful not only because it was the first session on this topic but also because it was when we, the co-editors of this special issue, first met. We did not know at the time that we would eventually become colleagues in the same department (we were both teaching at other universities back then), or even that we would co-edit the special issue we present here. But in hindsight, we now realize that that meeting marked the beginning of this collaborative project. To be sure, we bring to this special issue quite different perspectives and interests--Reuter, a sociologist of medicine, is concerned with the historical sociology of genetics knowledge and particularly its racialist material-discursive effects, while Neves-Graca, a social anthropologist of the environment, is concerned with the discursive and material "re-creation" of Life in the post-genomic era. While our respective research orientations diverge, we nonetheless share one key concern about what all this gene talk means--for society, for the individual, and even, or perhaps especially, for us as social scientists.
Indeed, in recent years, social scientists have had to negotiate new and complex terrain, namely the meaning and significance of "genes" and the implications of its related techno-scientific endeavours (e.g., DNA banking, genetic screening and testing, the Human Genome, Human Genome Diversity and HapMap Projects, and so forth). With the post-genomic transformation of axioms fundamental to the field of genetics, the heterogeneity of geneticized discourses has become increasingly evident, demanding even greater thoroughness from social scientific analysis. The enormous body of social scientific (as well as ethical and legal) literature that has been and continues to be generated in response to these phenomena suggests that the implications of this growing discourse for social scientific perspective(s) on human relations are still being unpacked and understood. The idea that diseases and bodies are social products has been well established, not least by sociologists of medicine concerned with questions of embodiment, medicalization, and even the politics of disease and diagnosis. But what about "genes," "genetics," and "genomics?" In what ways might we theorize and deconstruct expanding post-genomic socio-technical landscapes and account for genes as social products or agents in their own right (c.f. Webster, 2005)? Moreover, how are social scientists to understand the worlds imagined by these discourses, premised as they are upon the presumed emancipatory potential of genetic understanding and the associated determinist and reductionist beliefs?
By all, or at least many, accounts, it appears these discourses share the assumption that genetics holds the key to human life's most enduring problems. Chief among these is the maintenance of social order, as in fictional accounts of possible dystopian futures, where narratives of progress (Goss, 2007) often assure the public that genetic interventions can effectively eradicate deviant/criminal behavior (Petersen, 2006; Spallone, 1998). Genetic possibilities are even presented as the likely means of resolving the current environmental crisis; the chimera of genetically modified organisms is held out prophetically as our last hope for salvation from the problem of natural resource shortage (Salleh, 2006). Indeed, these beliefs have become so pervasive that they grant legitimacy to the emergence of new forms of life (Fisher, 2003), the reconceptualization of biological citizenship and "biovalue" (Rose and Novas, 2005; Waldby, 2002), the implementation of new forms of governance and civil responsibility (Fox, Ward and O'Rourke, 2006) or the development of new "machines" designed to tackle and master future relations between genes, human health, economic wealth and societal governance (Fujimura, 2005; Rabinow and Dan-Cohen, 2005).
We must consider these developments in the context of the global re-alignment of economic spheres and related forms of governance, in accordance with the dictums of biocapital, i.e., a global form of capitalism that emerges through the implementation of biotechnologies related to a new epistemology in the life sciences (Rajan, 2002; 2006: 178-79). To be sure, a growing number of social scientists have argued that the transformations caused by geneticized biotechnology are so profound that they correspond to an entirely new phase in human and natural history; these transformations are shaping our world globally, from the most private and small scale existences to the most public and macro eco-systemic spheres (e.g., Harvey and McMeekin, 2005; Fujimura, 2003; Rajan, 2006; Waldby, 2002). Biotechnology is becoming ubiquitous to all life forms and societies--present and future. This process is not merely a contemporary social-political dilemma; rather, it amounts to a complex discursive formation with unprecedented ontological, epistemological, ethical, material and social implications.
This special issue of The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, then, is in part a reaction to the optimism of genetics discourses. As the "geneticization" (Lippman, 1991) of everything continues unabated and gains increasing momentum, this collection alms to stop and take a proverbial breath, asking where we have been and where we are headed. To this end, this special issue examines genes and society in their social, historical and political context. Unified by the common goal of scrutinizing the intersection of genetics, socio-cultural processes, and relations of knowledge and power, these papers collectively explore a range of pressing concerns, opening up important avenues of dialogue and inquiry.
Although not all of the articles are explicitly Foucaultian in their orientation, questions about biopower and governmentality are in the background for all of the papers in this collection. We begin with William Leeming's article "On the Relevance of the 'Genetics-Based' Approach to Medicine for Sociological Perspectives on Medical Specialization." This paper offers a historically grounded account of the development and implementation of a 'genetics-based approach' to health and illness in Canada and in the U.K. and, thus, the associated "geneticization" of both health systems. Accordingly, Leeming unveils a series of connections that unfolded between the institutionalization of medical specializations in genetics, goals and interests of national and regional health services, the structuring effects of medical educational, research, protocol-policy and professional organizations, as well as the centrality of discourses that privileged a Mendelian--i.e., probabilistic--understanding of disease causation.
Leeming points to a discursive formation wherein the specialization strategies of medical doctors simultaneously deployed and reinforced dominating Mendelian discourses that presume a causal relation between genes, health and illness, thereby facilitating their normalization and naturalization. By exercising their power at the...
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