Ordinary Genomes Ordinary Genomes
Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices

Ordinary Genomes

Science, Citizenship, and Genetic Identities

    • 219,00 kr
    • 219,00 kr

Publisher Description

Ordinary Genomes is an ethnography of genomics, a global scientific enterprise, as it is understood and practiced in the Netherlands. Karen-Sue Taussig’s analysis of the Dutch case illustrates how scientific knowledge and culture are entwined: Genetics may transform society, but society also transforms genetics. Taussig traces the experiences of Dutch people as they encounter genetics in research labs, clinics, the media, and everyday life. Through vivid descriptions of specific diagnostic processes, she illuminates the open and evolving nature of genetic categories, the ways that abnormal genetic diagnoses are normalized, and the ways that race, ethnicity, gender, and religion inform diagnoses. Taussig contends that in the Netherlands ideas about genetics are shaped by the desire for ordinariness and the commitment to tolerance, two highly-valued yet sometimes contradictory Dutch social ideals, as well as by Dutch history and concerns about immigration and European unification. She argues that the Dutch enable a social ideal of tolerance by demarcating and containing difference so as to minimize its social threat. It is within this particular construction of tolerance that the Dutch manage the meaning of genetic difference.

  • GENRE
    Science & Nature
    RELEASED
    2009
    23 September
    LANGUAGE
    EN
    English
    LENGTH
    260
    Pages
    PUBLISHER
    Duke University Press
    SIZE
    2.2
    MB

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