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The concepts of governmentality and biopolitics were contemporaneous and interlinked in Michel Foucault's initial analyses. These foregrounded how in the eighteenth century the population emerged as a 'natural-cultural reality' resulting from an integration of biological and economic knowledge. Subsequent research on biopolitics and governmentality has tended to separate the concepts, differentiating into distinct research traditions each with different intellectual pathways. We propose to bring these conceptual innovations together to understand contemporary problems of the government of life, that is, of managing, controlling and optimizing a living population. In this domain, the natural/biological continues to intersect with the social/cultural in novel and unexpected ways. Straddling the specter of biopolitics, we examine four dimensions of the concept: vital threats and the resurrection of death power, the interplay of sovereignty, discipline and security, governmentalization through medical normalization, and 'securitization' of life as circulations and open series. The article also introduces this special feature on the government of life in which significant scholars explores issues of population management by drawing upon, debating, and developing the conceptual heritage of Foucault.

The contemporary 'global health agenda' has shifted emphasis from mapping disease patterns to calculating disease burden in efforts to gauge 'the state of world health'. In this article, we account for this shift by showing how a novel epidemiological style of thought emerged in the closing decades of the 20th century. As is well known, the compilation and tabulation of vital statistics – death rates, birth rates, morbidity rates – contributed to the birth of the 'population' in the 18th and 19th centuries. The population is reformatted from the middle of the 20th century by 'modified life tables' made up of disability weightings, health state valuations, quality of life scores, disease burden estimates, etc. The problem of morbid death gives way to that of morbid living, made calculable through a metrics of 'severity', 'disability', and 'impairment'. A series of new indices and scales (e.g. the QALY and DALY) has contributed to a governmentalisation of living, in the course of which the social and personal consequences of living with disease come to be an object of political concern, and made knowable, calculable and thereby amenable to various strategies of intervention. We conclude by showing how this style of epidemiological thought has generated a new global visibility for brain disorders as their impact on individuals, healthcare systems and nations are calculated in novel ways. ; The contemporary global health agenda has shifted emphasis from mapping disease patterns to calculating disease burden in efforts to gauge 'the state of world health'. In this paper, we account for this shift by showing how a novel epidemiological style of thought emerged in the closing decades of the twentieth century. As is well known, the compilation and tabulation of vital statistics – death-rates, birth-rates, morbidity rates – contributed to the birth of the 'population' in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The population is reformatted from the middle of the twentieth century by 'modified life tables' made up of disability weightings, health state valuations, quality of life scores, disease burden estimates, etc. The problem of morbid death gives way to that of morbid living, made calculable through a metrics of 'severity', 'disability' and 'impairment'. A series of new indices and scales (e.g. the QALY and DALY) has contributed to a governmentalization of living, in the course of which the social and personal consequences of living with disease come to be an object of political concern, and made knowable, calculable and thereby amenable to various strategies of intervention. We conclude by showing how this style of epidemiological thought has generated a new global visibility for brain disorders as their impact on individuals, health care systems and nations are calculated in novel ways.

Several years ago, both authors engaged in research into bioscience and biomedical regulation in Asian countries. One of us (BP) explored why the regulatory and discursive embedding of human embryonic stem cell research in Israel was much more permissive than elsewhere. The other author (AW) sought to understand the conditions under which traditional herbal medicine came to be mobilised in Vietnam's national health delivery system to an extent that it is now considered one of the most integrated in the world. In both cases, we found that to understand science policies and regulatory frameworks we needed to go beyond official documents and expert interviews, and instead move the meanings of social conventions, political, legal and social histories, as well as other informal practices, into the focus of our studies. Exploring these conditions of possibility for the regulatory configurations in our case studies meant bringing what we call 'ethnographic sensibility' to our research. This article discusses the implications of this approach, which often entails rendering visible the contradictions and 'disorders' in what seems coherent and orderly. ; Several years ago, both authors engaged in research into bioscience and biomedical regulation in Asian countries. One of us (BP) explored why the regulatory and discursive embedding of human embryonic stem cell in Israel was much more permissive than elsewhere. The other author (AW) sought to understand the conditions under which traditional herbal medicine came to be mobilised in Vietnam's national health delivery system to an extent that it is now considered one of the most integrated in the world. In both cases, we found that to understand science policies and regulatory frameworks we needed to go beyond official documents and expert interviews, and instead move the meanings of social conventions, political, legal, and social histories, as well as other informal practices, into the focus of our studies. Exploring these conditions of possibility for the regulatory configurations in our case studies meant bringing what we call 'ethnographic sensibility' to our research. This paper discusses the implications of this approach, which often entails rendering visible the contradictions and 'disorders' in what seems coherent and orderly.

Foreword: The Egg Imaginary -- Preface -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- 1: Introduction: Kinds of Children -- From 'Helping Hand' to 'Guiding Hand' -- Gametes, Embryos, Foetuses -- Tracking Routes of Routinization -- Tracking the Economic and Political Forces Underpinning Routinization -- Conclusion: Ethnographies of SRTs -- Notes -- References -- Sources for Table 1.1 -- Part I: Sex Selection -- 2: Coping with Sex-Selective Abortions in Vietnam: An Ethnographic Study of Selective Reproduction as Emotional Experience -- Sex-Selective Abortion: Women's Emotional Reactions -- The Context of Sex Selection in Vietnam -- Deciding for a Sex-Selective Abortion: Emotional Ambivalence -- Undergoing the Abortion: Physical and Emotional Suffering -- After the Abortion: Silence, Suffering and Spiritual Relief -- Conclusions -- Notes -- References -- 3: The Development of Sex-Selective Reproductive Technologies Within Fertility, Inc. and the Anticipation of Lifestyle Sex Selection -- The Agriculture Industry: The Seedbed of Sex-­Selective Reproductive Technologies -- "A powerful approach to disease prevention": The Transfer to Human Medicine -- Anticipating Lifestyle Sex Selection -- Conclusion -- Notes -- References -- Part II: Preventing Disease and Disability -- 4: Moral Adherers: Pregnant Women Undergoing Routine Prenatal Screening in Denmark -- Prenatal Screening and Selective Abortion in a Danish Context -- Moral Adherers -- When you have the offer, you take it: Collectivized Responsibility of Selection -- Social Imaginaries -- Negotiating Wantedness -- Negotiating Fetal Living -- Conclusion: Structural Directiveness in Danish Antenatal Care -- Notes -- References -- 5: Moral Bearing: The Paradox of Choice, Anxiety and Responsibility in Taiwan

AbstractWhile unequally resourced partners from the so-called global South are often considered 'mere sample providers' in larger international genomics collaborations, in this paper, we show how they strategically work to mobilize their role in a global system of tissue exchange to deliver services for local communities. We unpack how a prenatal diagnostic service for thalassemia in Pakistan emerged out of the maneuvering efforts of internationally connected Pakistani researchers. By tracing the distributed capacities that emerged and circulated as they set about improving medical genetics in Pakistan, we outline some key conditions that led to the establishment of the service: first, the scale of unmet needs that geneticists faced when collecting data as part of their research that made medical genomics a relevant field; secondly, joint efforts between researchers and physicians that were engaged with the challenge of decreasing disease prevalence through diagnostics and abortion; and finally, the ways in which international research collaborations helped generate resources to improve medical genetics in Pakistan. To understand how genetic research and medicine is currently being developed in Pakistan, we need to ethnographically re-center our analyses in ways that allow us to identify the resourceful ways in which researchers maneuvre to secure locally relevant outcomes.

From a historical perspective, selective reproduction is nothing new. Infanticide, abandonment, and selective neglect of children have a long history, and the widespread deployment of sterilization and forced abortion in the twentieth century has been well documented. Yet in recent decades selective reproduction has been placed under the aegis of science and expertise in novel ways. New laboratory and clinical techniques allow for the selective fertilization of gametes, implantation of embryos, or abortion of fetuses. Although they will often overlap with assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), what we term selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) are of a more specific nature: Rather than aiming to overcome infertility, they are used to prevent or allow the birth of certain kinds of children. This review highlights anthropological research into SRTs in different parts of the world, discussing how selective reproduction engages with issues of long-standing theoretical concern in anthropology, such as politics, kinship, gender, religion, globalization, and inequality.

Drawing upon the empirical scholarship and research expertise of contributors from all settled continents and from diverse life settings and economies, Viral Loads illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and responses to it, lay bare and load onto people's lived realities in countries around the world. A crosscutting theme pertains to how social unevenness and gross economic disparities are shaping global and local responses to the pandemic, and illustrate the effects of both the virus and efforts to contain it in ways that amplify these inequalities. At the same time, the contributions highlight the nature of contemporary social life, including virtual communication, the nature of communities, neoliberalism and contemporary political economies, and the shifting nature of nation states and the role of government. Over half of the world's population has been affected by restrictions of movement, with physical distancing requirements and self-isolation recommendations impacting profoundly on everyday life but also on the economy, resulting also, in turn, with dramatic shifts in the economy and in mass unemployment. By reflecting on how the pandemic has interrupted daily lives, state infrastructures and healthcare systems, the contributing authors in this volume mobilise anthropological theories and concepts to locate the pandemic in a highly connected and exceedingly unequal world. The book is ambitious in its scope – spanning the entire globe – and daring in its insistence that medical anthropology must be a part of the growing calls to build a new world.

The Anthropology of Technology: The Formation of a Field -- Section 1: Perspectives, Fields, and Approaches -- Making 'Technology' Visible: Technical Activities and the Chaîne Opératoire -- Technology as Skill in Handwork and Craft: Basketwork and Handweaving -- Material Culture Studies: Objectification, Agency, and Intangibility -- Feminist Technoscience and New Imaginaries of Human Reproduction -- Assemblage Ethnography: Configurations Across Scales, Sites, and Practices -- Humanism, Posthumanism, and New Humanism: How Robots Challenge the Anthropological Object -- Structuring Race into the Machine: The Spoiled Promise of Postgenomic Gene Sequencing -- An Interventional Design Anthropology of Emerging Technologies: Working Through an Interdisciplinary Field -- Computational Ethnography: A Case of Covid-19's Methodological Consequences -- Section 2: Knowing, Unknowing, and Re-knowing -- Knowing, Unknowing, and Re-knowing -- Technology, Environment, and the Ends of Knowledge -- Charting the Unknown: Tracking the Self, Experimenting with the Digital -- Data, Knowledge Practices, and Naturecultural Worlds: Vehicle Emissions in the Anthropocene -- Set, Setting, and Clinical Trials: Colonial Technologies and Psychedelics -- Assembling Population Data in the Field: The Labour, Technologies, and Materialities of Quantification -- Peopled by Data: Statistical Knowledge Practices, Population-Making, and the State -- Data Practices and Sustainable Development Goals: Organising Knowledge for Sustainable Futures -- Section 3: Communities, Collectives, and Categories -- Communities, Collectives, and Categories -- Un/Doing Race: On Technology, Individuals, and Collectives in Forensic Practice -- Learning, Technology, and the Instrumentalisation of Critique -- Technology, Gender, and Nation: Building Modern Citizens in Maoist China -- Imagineerism: Technology, Robots, Kinship. Perspectives from Japan -- Collectivities and Technological Activism: Feminist Hacking -- Inside Technology Organisations: Imaginaries of Digitalisation at Work -- Section 4: Ethics, Values, and Morality -- Ethics, Values, and Morality -- Moral Ambiguities: Fleshy and Digital Substitutes in the Life Sciences -- Enacting Authenticity: Changing Ontologies of Biological Entities -- Technologies of Beauty: The Materiality, Ethics, and Normativity of Cosmetic Citizenship -- The Optimised and Enhanced Self: Experiences of the Self and the Making of Societal Values -- Articulations of Ethics: Energy Worlds and Moral Selves -- Competing Responsibilities and the Ethics of Care in Young People's Engagements with Digital Mental Health -- Committee Work: Stem Cell Governance in the United States -- Section 5: Infrastructures, Linkages, and Livelihoods -- Infrastructures, Linkages, and Livelihoods -- Accumulation: Exploring the Materiality of Energy Infrastructure -- Food Infrastructures and Technologies of Trust in Contemporary China -- Water Infrastructures: The Making and Maintenance of Material and Organisational Connections -- Electricity as a Field for Anthropological Theorizing and Research -- Circuit Board Money: An Infrastructural Perspective on Digital Payments.

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements provides a contemporary rethinking of Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of elements, bringing together "elemental" stories to reflect on everyday life in the Anthropocene. Concise and engaging, this book provides stories of scale, toxicity, and temporality that extrapolate on ideas surrounding ethics, politics, and materiality that are fundamental to this contemporary moment. Examining elemental objects and forces, including carbon, mould, cheese, ice, and viruses, the contributors question what elemental forms are still waiting to emerge and what political possibilities of justice and environmental reparation they might usher into the world. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, and media studies scholars, this book tests a range of possible ways to tabulate and narrate the elemental as a way to bring into view fresh discussion on material constitutions and, thereby, new ethical stances, responsibilities, and power relations. In doing so, An Anthropogenic Table of Elements demonstrates through elementality that even the smallest and humblest stories are capable of powerful effects and vast journeys across time and space