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A 'techno-somatic' (Pickersgill, forthcoming) ethic is today widespread, though not hegemonic, within much of contemporary 'Western' psychiatry. Such an approach entails an epistemological emphasis on technoscientific methodologies and knowledges, and an ontological preoccupation with the body as the locus of psychopathology. A techno-somatic ethic thus engenders, for instance, a perspective on psychiatric research that privileges studies into neurotransmitters and genes over epidemiological and sociological investigations into the social determinants of psychopathology. Such an orientation both legitimates, and is legitimated by, an understanding of psychiatric disorder as being in some way localizable within the body (including the brain). Nowhere is a techno-somatic approach more apparent than in neuroscientific research into psychiatric disorders. Although the relationship between neuroscience and clinical practice is 'uncertain' (Cullen and Cohn, 2006: 117), it is clear that neurologic approaches to the study of conditions like schizophrenia and depression are increasingly common and the idiom of these researches resonates through psychiatry (Rose, 2007).
Imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) have significant scientific, clinical and cultural authority (Beaulieu, 2001, 2002; Dumit, 2004; Joyce, 2008), and, like genetic tools and methods (Rosenberg, 2007), are imbued with the hopes of funders, researchers, practitioners and publics (Borck, 2008; Hagner and Borck, 2001). As with genetics, neuroscience may also be a focus of concern to many. Psychiatrists, for instance, can be critical of what they construe as determinism and therapeutic nihilism within neuroscientific research (e.g. Benning, 2003; Lewis, 2006). Sociologists too are not unaware of the degree to which neuroscience potentially renders problematic certain of their assumptions and theoretical positions. Neurologic attempts to 'explain' behaviour may thus be taken to be part of the broader 'reductionist challenge' (Duster, 2006) presented by biomedical science.
Yet, totalizing critiques of somatic reductionism stand in marked contrast to some of the claims of scientists themselves. For instance, in the introduction to a 2008 special issue of the journal Science on the 'Genetics of behavior', the editors opened with the following assertion:
When it comes to behavior, we have moved beyond genetic determinism. Our genes do not lock us into certain ways of acting; rather, genetic influences are complicated and mutable and are only one of many factors affecting...