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This article draws attention to the production and circulation of genetic knowledge among three constituencies—laboratory researchers, clinicians, and health advocates— all of whom have a stake in research on a heritable connective tissue condition known as Marfan syndrome. National and international conferences provide a context that brings members of these groups together. Such meetings are performance settings, which include the display of visual images depicting various aspects of Marfan syndrome and of the bodies and lived experience of those who have it. The article examines how these images are interpreted, appropriated, and exchanged and how their circulation is both grounded in local knowledge and the grounds for transformative translocal practice.

Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology. Susan Leigh Star. ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. 421 pp.Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex Hormones. Nelly Oudshoorn. London: Routledge, 1994. 195 pp.Science and Technology in. Multicultural World: The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts. David J. Hess. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. 306 pp.

In this "In Focus" introduction, we present the ways in which discourses of techne (craft or artisanship) and technoscience mediate the production, consumption, and circulation of food and drink. The authors in this "In Focus" examine food and drink as localized instances of large‐scale spatial and temporal processes and as cultural‐material markers of power/knowledge. Our work on the current controversies surrounding foie gras exemplifies how specialty commodities marketed as "artisanal" are simultaneously legitimated through technoscientific practices and invocations of tradition or nature. Claims to distinction based on tradition or "terroir" are also imbricated in global industrial production and distribution.

Women play a prominent role as traders in the central market of the regional capital of Kaolack, a multi-ethnic, predominantly Wolof city in Senegal. This article examines gender and class in relation to the social uses of space that reproduce social hierarchy, while facilitating challenges to the dominant social order. Challenges take the form of activities such as smuggling, seen as an assertion of regional autonomy. (DÜI-Hff)

The so-called science wars pit science against culture, and nowhere is the struggle more contentious--or more fraught with paradox--than in the burgeoning realm of genetics. A constructive response, and a welcome intervention, this volume brings together biological and cultural anthropologists to conduct an interdisciplinary dialogue that provokes and instructs even as it bridges the science/culture divide

This article, based on a collaborative research project on genetic knowledge production, examines the relations between on- and off-line field sites related to three heritable diseases: epidermolysis bullosa, chondrodysplasia, and Marfan syndrome. Field sites include the Web sites, listservs, and chat rooms run by lay health advocacy groups and biomedical professionals as well laboratories, clinics, and support groups meetings. The analysis uses the notion of location work, and the concept of the node that links different elements in a network, in describing a relational approach to multisited ethnography. The article presents three case studies that examine shifting locations between online and face-to-face relations, hyperlinks as a metaphor for interactive knowledge production, and the process of negotiating a networked ethics.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies -- PART I Substantial-Codings: From Blood to Hypertext -- 1. Substantivism, Antisubstantivism, and Anti-antisubstantivism -- 2. The Ethnography of Creation: Lewis Henry Morgan and the American Beaver -- 3. Making Kinship, with an Old Reproductive Technology -- 4. Kinship in Hypertext: Transubstantiating Fatherhood and Information Flow in Artificial Life -- PART II Kinship Negotiations: What's Biology Not/Got to Do with It -- 5. Kinship, Controversy, and the Sharing of Substance: The Race/ Class Politics of Blood Transfusion -- 6. Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic -- 7. Self-Conscious Kinship: Some Contested Values in Norwegian Transnational Adoption -- 8. Practicing Kinship in Rural North China -- 9. The Shift in Kinship Studies in France: The Case of Grandparenting -- PART III Nature, Culture, and the Properties of Kinship -- 10. The Economies in Kinship and the Paternity of Culture: Origin Stories in Kinship Theory -- 11. Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of the New Biologies -- PART IV 'R' Genes Us? The Uses of Gene/alogies -- 12. Blood/Kinship, Governmentality, and Cultures of Order in Colonial Africa -- 13. ''We're Going to Tell These People Who They Really Are'': Science and Relatedness -- 14. Genealogical Dis-Ease: Where Hereditary Abnormality, Biomedical Explanation, and Family Responsibility Meet -- PART V Ambivalence and Violence at the Heart of Kinship -- 15. Ambivalence in Kinship since the 1940s -- 16. Cutting the Ties That Bind: The Sacrifice of Abraham and Patriarchal Kinship -- 17. To Forget Their Tongue, Their Name, and Their Whole Relation: Captivity, Extra-Tribal Adoption, and the Indian Child Welfare Act -- Contributors -- Index