In my class Anthropology of the Body and Technology I wanted to raise issues that in my understanding were central to a critical debate on the body and technology. Most of those issues were related to how our contemporary society engages in bodily manipulations through different kinds of technology, and what kind of cultural meanings they had. In class we debated “post-human” or cyborg embodiments enabled by new technologies; biotechnology and how it changed cultural understandings of the body; the politics of stem cells; art and other cultural representations of the body as it becomes confused with technical artifacts. One important aspect, in my view, was to also discuss the history of bodily manipulations in the West, giving the students the idea that industrial societies have engaged biology and human enhancement since at least the 19th Century, namely through a discussion of Eugenics and how it manifested itself in the past, present and potentially in the future. 
The first difficulty I encountered was to lead the students to question the very fundamental premises of how they understand the relationship between technology, body and society. To most of them, there is a direct causal relationship between these terms: technologies somehow “create” societal forms at each specific historical moment. Technologies were thus totally transparent in their functions, expressing fundamental truths about Nature through scientific inquiry. The increasing control over natural processes enabled by technology caused society to advance, being one of the principal causal factors of cultural change. It seems that many of them expected from the class a rather superficial debate on the myriad novel technologies available today, ranging from cloning, teledildonics, new medications, human-animal chimeras, and other such mind boggling achievements of science which are a constant presence in the media and cultural products. The fascination with new technology thus obfuscates the possibility of questioning them in any critical fashion, which very soon presented itself as the most important challenge of teaching such a class.
How to inspire them to look at these technical developments in a manner that differed from their common perceptions? How to see new technologies of the body not simply as an expression of scientific prowess but as embodiments and crystallizations of social and cultural perceptions? How to view them as expressing also specific relationships of power, social inequalities and political struggles? How to try to “deconstruct”, to use an outdated 20th Century term, the premises present in developments such as pre-implantation screening of embryos created in vitro? How to take a pervasive term such as “cyborg” and use it not just as a descriptive term of a very commonplace cultural icon of contemporary science fiction, but as an analytical tool that enables us to better grasp the reach of contemporary phenomena that are at the same time social and scientific, natural and artificial?
The discussions we had of race were by far the most polemic. The idea of race is a very strong cultural marker for North American students. As has become very clear in recent episodes of public expression of prejudice and the concurrent public outcry against these expressions, issues of race are still an exposed nerve in American society. When some scientists try to argue that the idea of human sub-races, for example, don’t exist, it is almost impossible for the students to even consider the possibility, or to suppress their beliefs for any moment whatsoever, enough to only grasp what the author means by “race”. I consider those debates an ethnographical moment for me: as a Brazilian citizen, I grew up in a society where race is deemed non-existent, at least in our fundamental philosophical understanding or the specificity of Brazilian society[1].
The most shocking debate, to me, was on Eugenics and new technologies. I showed the class the documentary The Lynchburg Story[2], a sadly little known episode in American history. The documentary shows survivors of the Virginia colony for the “unfit”, where poor and uneducated boys and girls, usually social outcasts, were forcibly sterilized under state law in order to ensure that their bad inheritance would not further pollute the collective health. The sterilization of American citizens on eugenic grounds, as the documentary shows, went on until the 1970s, and still to this day apologies from authorities over this period are a very rare occasion, and legal battles still rage on.
The shocking aspect to me was to see how unmoved most of my students were by the documentary. Some commented on the music or hairstyles, others stated that the sterilizations were done based on bad science or sloppy enforcement of legislation 9a danger we don’t run into nowadays), and most seemed apathetic to the issue. Indeed, eugenic sterilizations seem so alien to American reality as Soviet 5 year plans, and yet most Western countries adopted wide reaching eugenic legislation. The state of California, so identified today by cultural and political liberalism, was in the beginning of the 20th Century the champion of eugenic sterilizations, and crafted laws that would later inspire the Nazi regime.
When debating how new genetic technologies were being used to give new legitimacy to Eugenic practices of eliminating the unfit, this time through the alteration or elimination of bad genes, none of my students seemed at all impressed by this. After all, what’s wrong with eliminating disease, they asked me. Why should this be even questioned? The difficulty of connecting the horrors of early eugenics with the contemporary practice of it was, to me, a sad reminder of how far we still are from a critical understanding and informed public debate on science and technology.
The idea that early eugenics was based on “bad science” and that was the only flaw that it had, seemed to be a common one among my students. That means that eugenics itself, or the will to enhance and improve the human stock, either by eliminating certain traits, or prohibiting some traits to be passed on, was not flawed. With “good science” the mistakes of early days would be fixed and genetics would allow us to improve and enhance the human species biologically. What seemed for them harder to question was the idea that science can be used in manipulating the human biological condition, or that the better science was always the key to solving every social problem (conflated with biological pathologies). To question the place science has in our worldviews, or at least to become aware of it, seemed the most daunting task.
What is troubling is not that students find it appealing to use technology to solve human problems, or to improve human health. Those goals are very much something that society should invest energy and resources into. The problem is our collective inability to look at those goals and question the best way to achieve them, and to have well-informed opinions about what lays behind the choices we make in terms of how to manipulate our genetic make-up. What counts as healthy, and why? Who has the legitimacy to define that? Are these categories beyond critique? What means are legitimate to achieve such goals? What are the political issues behind our practices of bodily intervention and manipulation? To give up debate and just trust “good science” is, in my view, to ignore the place science has within our social structures, and is a choice not exercise the democratic imperative of making well informed choices and evaluating them openly and critically.
The first difficulty I encountered was to lead the students to question the very fundamental premises of how they understand the relationship between technology, body and society. To most of them, there is a direct causal relationship between these terms: technologies somehow “create” societal forms at each specific historical moment. Technologies were thus totally transparent in their functions, expressing fundamental truths about Nature through scientific inquiry. The increasing control over natural processes enabled by technology caused society to advance, being one of the principal causal factors of cultural change. It seems that many of them expected from the class a rather superficial debate on the myriad novel technologies available today, ranging from cloning, teledildonics, new medications, human-animal chimeras, and other such mind boggling achievements of science which are a constant presence in the media and cultural products. The fascination with new technology thus obfuscates the possibility of questioning them in any critical fashion, which very soon presented itself as the most important challenge of teaching such a class.
How to inspire them to look at these technical developments in a manner that differed from their common perceptions? How to see new technologies of the body not simply as an expression of scientific prowess but as embodiments and crystallizations of social and cultural perceptions? How to view them as expressing also specific relationships of power, social inequalities and political struggles? How to try to “deconstruct”, to use an outdated 20th Century term, the premises present in developments such as pre-implantation screening of embryos created in vitro? How to take a pervasive term such as “cyborg” and use it not just as a descriptive term of a very commonplace cultural icon of contemporary science fiction, but as an analytical tool that enables us to better grasp the reach of contemporary phenomena that are at the same time social and scientific, natural and artificial?
The discussions we had of race were by far the most polemic. The idea of race is a very strong cultural marker for North American students. As has become very clear in recent episodes of public expression of prejudice and the concurrent public outcry against these expressions, issues of race are still an exposed nerve in American society. When some scientists try to argue that the idea of human sub-races, for example, don’t exist, it is almost impossible for the students to even consider the possibility, or to suppress their beliefs for any moment whatsoever, enough to only grasp what the author means by “race”. I consider those debates an ethnographical moment for me: as a Brazilian citizen, I grew up in a society where race is deemed non-existent, at least in our fundamental philosophical understanding or the specificity of Brazilian society[1].
The most shocking debate, to me, was on Eugenics and new technologies. I showed the class the documentary The Lynchburg Story[2], a sadly little known episode in American history. The documentary shows survivors of the Virginia colony for the “unfit”, where poor and uneducated boys and girls, usually social outcasts, were forcibly sterilized under state law in order to ensure that their bad inheritance would not further pollute the collective health. The sterilization of American citizens on eugenic grounds, as the documentary shows, went on until the 1970s, and still to this day apologies from authorities over this period are a very rare occasion, and legal battles still rage on.
The shocking aspect to me was to see how unmoved most of my students were by the documentary. Some commented on the music or hairstyles, others stated that the sterilizations were done based on bad science or sloppy enforcement of legislation 9a danger we don’t run into nowadays), and most seemed apathetic to the issue. Indeed, eugenic sterilizations seem so alien to American reality as Soviet 5 year plans, and yet most Western countries adopted wide reaching eugenic legislation. The state of California, so identified today by cultural and political liberalism, was in the beginning of the 20th Century the champion of eugenic sterilizations, and crafted laws that would later inspire the Nazi regime.
When debating how new genetic technologies were being used to give new legitimacy to Eugenic practices of eliminating the unfit, this time through the alteration or elimination of bad genes, none of my students seemed at all impressed by this. After all, what’s wrong with eliminating disease, they asked me. Why should this be even questioned? The difficulty of connecting the horrors of early eugenics with the contemporary practice of it was, to me, a sad reminder of how far we still are from a critical understanding and informed public debate on science and technology.
The idea that early eugenics was based on “bad science” and that was the only flaw that it had, seemed to be a common one among my students. That means that eugenics itself, or the will to enhance and improve the human stock, either by eliminating certain traits, or prohibiting some traits to be passed on, was not flawed. With “good science” the mistakes of early days would be fixed and genetics would allow us to improve and enhance the human species biologically. What seemed for them harder to question was the idea that science can be used in manipulating the human biological condition, or that the better science was always the key to solving every social problem (conflated with biological pathologies). To question the place science has in our worldviews, or at least to become aware of it, seemed the most daunting task.
What is troubling is not that students find it appealing to use technology to solve human problems, or to improve human health. Those goals are very much something that society should invest energy and resources into. The problem is our collective inability to look at those goals and question the best way to achieve them, and to have well-informed opinions about what lays behind the choices we make in terms of how to manipulate our genetic make-up. What counts as healthy, and why? Who has the legitimacy to define that? Are these categories beyond critique? What means are legitimate to achieve such goals? What are the political issues behind our practices of bodily intervention and manipulation? To give up debate and just trust “good science” is, in my view, to ignore the place science has within our social structures, and is a choice not exercise the democratic imperative of making well informed choices and evaluating them openly and critically.
___________________________________________________________________
NOTES:
[1] This strand of thought has its most fundamental expression in the work of Gilberto Freyre (especially Casa Grande & Senzala), a classic of Brazilian literature, Social Science and cultural commentary. His vision of a civilization borne out of the relationships established in the slave economy of sugarcane, at the origin of Brazilian colonization by the Portuguese, still mark the way Brazilians think of themselves intellectually.
[2] The Lynchburg Story. New York: Filmmakers Library, 1993, 55 min.
NOTES:
[1] This strand of thought has its most fundamental expression in the work of Gilberto Freyre (especially Casa Grande & Senzala), a classic of Brazilian literature, Social Science and cultural commentary. His vision of a civilization borne out of the relationships established in the slave economy of sugarcane, at the origin of Brazilian colonization by the Portuguese, still mark the way Brazilians think of themselves intellectually.
[2] The Lynchburg Story. New York: Filmmakers Library, 1993, 55 min.
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