Anthropology Colloquium Series Fall Semester 2005

"Medical Nation: Health and Biotechnology in21st Century China." Speaker: Nancy Chen, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz. The transformations in China and its biosciences in recent years have been breathtaking. Changing legal interpretations and definitions of biotechnology over the past decade offer a political and historical map of this category and evolving industry. Attention to such shifts helps to situate my main question, "What is biotech in China and how is it a platform for state making in the 21st century?" I argue that localized differences in biotechnology practice and policy in Asia are significantly shaped by structural formations across different sectors “ agricultural, genomic, pharmaceutical “ which contribute to the ways in which biotechnology circulates both as an industry and as an imagined force of production. Moreover, the combination of public and private funding for such projects indicate the ways in which bare life, or biological life, is being reconfigured through the rubric of market consumption. Biotech projects in mainland China will be compared with endeavors elsewhere in Asia, specifically Singapore's Biopolis. This presentation reports on new formations of capital and social disparity based on ethnographic interviews conducted in summers of 2003 & 2002 and winters 1999 & 1997.

As a medical anthropologist, Nancy Chen focuses on healing practices and health institutions. She has conducted fieldwork in mainland China, primarily, with comparative research in the United States. Her early ethnographic project compared how psychiatry and mental health become national agendas for social integration in Asia while, simultaneously, alternative forms of healing resurged. She is the author of Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry and Healing in China (Columbia University Press, 2003) and co-editor of China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture (Duke University Press, 2001).

Event Sponsor
Anthropology / Center for Chinese Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa

More Information
Denise Wandasan, 956-7153, wandasan@hawaii.edu

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