Reterritorialization of the Body: Ethnographies of Emergent Biotechnologies

Consider this: a pig's heart pumping blood through a human's veins, after that human's heart has failed to sustain the same vital pulse. A prosthetic arm controlled by a veteran amputee's neurons, with sensory feedback enabling the sense of touch where previously nothing could be felt. A suicide victim's kidney seeking social and moral salvation, implanting itself into another's physical form. These glimpses, taken from ethnographies on biotechnological bodily interventions, speak to burgeoning realities that complicate our notion of what is—and isn't—the human body.

A wave of recent critical literatures on emergent biotechnologies, which I engage here, challenge and trouble classical anthropology of the body. In The Transplant Imaginary, Lesley Sharp (2013) considers the role of moral thinking in the anticipatory experimental imaginaries of xenotransplantation and bioengineering. Aslihan Sanal (2011), in New Organs Within Us, investigates castings of life, death, and the inner worlds of kidney transplantation in Turkey. Cassandra Crawford's (2014) Phantom Limb explores the phenomenon of phantom limb and the imbrication of ghosts (phantoms) with the physical form amidst prosthetization. A crucial analytical thread weaves through these works: the insufficiency of existent categories and containers (scientific, moral, social, psychical) in explaining bodies as they are extended by (and extend upon) technologies.

Indeed, the body proves fickle and elusive for both the biological and social sciences. In classical anthropology, the body emerges as not only a physical being but an instrument; one might recall Marcel Mauss' (1935:75) declaration, "the body is man's first and most natural instrument." Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock (1987) offer the "three bodies"—the "individual body-self," the "social body," and the "body politic"—to conceptualize the multiple domains through which the body performs and circulates. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1988) challenge the notion of the organic body with their "body without organs," envisioning the body as multiply iterated. If Deleuze and Guattari were among the first to trouble the organic body, now we see such a challenge acquire a literal (and visceral) reality. Emerging biotechnologies and highly experimental sciences fashion bodies that defy corporeal categories. Two bodies in particular—the prosthetic body and the transplant body—raise questions to prevailing modes of anthropological thought. These bodies renegotiate their own boundaries and integrity, seemingly begging us to consider the reciprocal of Mauss' declaration: "the instrument is man's most natural body." As the ethnographies of Sharp, Sanal, and Crawford show, the instrumental increasingly reterritorializes the natural.

In the liminal borderlands of the transplant and prosthetic encounters, new forms of life emerge (Fischer 2003). The lived and embodied experiences of organ transplantation and prosthetic science trouble and reframe prevailing tropes of body discourse. Several tropes in particular urge reworking: normativity and (dis)ability, the visible/invisible, the part/whole, and the mind (brain)/body. Navigating the insufficiencies of existent tropes, these ethnographies open up new ways to conceive of machines, technical objects, and their relationship with bodies. In what follows, I trace the ways in which Sharp, Shanal, and Crawford's characters probe, engage, absorb, and contend with techno-biological encounters and emergent forms of life.

Imagined Wholes

In focusing on the lives of scientists and the ways in which "intended patients' bodies" get prefigured, Lesley Sharp's (2013:16) ethnography deals not with the concrete materiality of the body but with its (re)configuration in a technical imaginary. Yet despite this projective imaginary, she situates biotechnological reconstructions of the body in a post-millenial world, one in which "the body is already a hybridized one because we already willingly interface with all sorts of devices such that our bodies are not our own or exclusively us" (42). In the face...