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Key Words
Medical anthropology, biopolitics, social studies of science, personhood, birth, death
Abstract
This essay reviews recent anthropological attention to the "beginnings" and "endings" of life. A large literature since the 1990s highlights the analytic trends and innovations that characterize anthropological attention to the cultural production of persons, the naturalization of life, and the emergence of new life forms. Part I of this essay outlines the coming-into-being, completion and attenuation of personhood and how life and death are attributed, contested, and enacted. Dominant themes include how connections are forged or severed between the living and the dead and the socio-politics of dead, dying, and decaying bodies. The culture of medicine is examined for its role in organizing and naming life and death. Part II is organized by the turn to biopolitical analyses stimulated by the work of Foucault. It encompasses the ways in which the biosciences and biotechnologies, along with state practices, govern forms of living and dying and new forms of life such as the stem cell, embryo, comatose, and brain dead, and it emphasizes the production of value. Much of this scholarship is informed by concepts of liminality (a period and state of being between social statuses) and subjectification (in which notions of self, citizenship, life and its management are linked to the production of knowledge and political forms of regulation).
INTRODUCTION
A desperately poor young mother dies of AIDS. Half a world away, a child is born as the result of a $50,000 in-vitro fertilization procedure. By juxtaposing the literature that explores such discordant events-low-tech and high-tech births and deaths, traditional rituals and innovative biomedical practices-this review speaks to the dissimilar conditions that allow humans to come into and out of existence, and the range of analytic reflection on socially significant thresholds and borders. Anthropologists have often used the margins of life as a site for examining the making and unmaking of persons and relationships, social and corporeal bodies, and life itself. Yet never has the anthropological literature on the beginnings and ends of life been as stimulating as it is now. Over the past fifteen years, scholars have become increasingly concerned with how the boundaries of life and death are asserted and negotiated, and with the identity categories that such...