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From Measuring Rods to DNA Sequencing


From Measuring Rods to DNA Sequencing

Assessing the Human
Health, Technology and Society

von: Ingrid Voléry, Marie-Pierre Julien

CHF 142.00

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
Format: PDF
Veröffentl.: 05.12.2020
ISBN/EAN: 9789811575822
Sprache: englisch

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Beschreibungen

This book provides a solid basis to understand two centuries of bodily measurement practices and their scientific and political scope throughout the Western world. By exploring various cases, it proposes a new approach of measurement from an epistemological point of view and demonstrates the central role of the measurement of the body for political purposes. By studying categorizations of race, age and quality of life between the 19th and 20th century, the first part of the book highlights how human body measurements extend from the flesh to subjective experience. The second part shows how genomic correction and life support technologies reshape the frontiers between things, humans and social subjects. The final part reveals how contemporary measurements of age, race and disease gave rise to new hierarchies between human beings and social groups. The book concludes by considering different styles of measuring the body and their ontological consequences.
<div>Chapter 1: Introduction: What measuring means.- Part I. The Measurements of the human body between the 19th and the 20th century: from the flesh to the subjectivity.- Chapter 2: Producing Otherness Through Resemblance. Bodily orifices and the measuring of the human (1800-1860).- Chapter 3: Talking Bones: age in 19th-century forensic handbooks (1813-1906).- Chapter 4: Thinking “quality of life”: from measures to categorizations of the human beings.- Part II. Between objectivization and subjectivization: How forensic identification, genomic correction and life support technologies reshape the frontiers between things, human person and social subject.- Chapter 5: Being born in the era of genomics.- Chapter 6: From “technicized” bodies to body technologies: the human in resuscitative care, between objectivization and subjectivization.- Part III. Measurement and the Rise of New Hierarchies between human beings.- Chapter 7: Bone Geopolitics. Bone Age and the Racialization of Growth in UK and US Pediatrics (1940-1980).- Chapter 8: Models of corporeality and controversies around puberty.- Chapter 9: Everyone for himself and all together? Thinking “race” between social science, epidemiology, and medicine.- Chapter 10: Conclusion: Measurement as an ontological scalpel.<br></div>
<div>Ingrid Voléry is full professor of sociology at the Université de Lorraine and member of Laboratoire Lorrain de Sciences Sociales (2L2S).&nbsp;</div><div><br></div><div>Marie-Pierre Julien is lecturer of sociology and anthropology at the Université de Lorraine and member of 2L2S.</div>
“Why do you measure and why are <i>you</i> also measured? What measurement tools are used to offer a quantified vision of the body and its parts, its growth, and of human life itself? Is measurement the same thing as quantification? Based on in-depth historical investigations and case studies from the 19th century up to the present day, this book proposes enlightening answers to such questions. Combining basic insight from the ‘classics’—Foucault, Rose—on the political dimension of measurement with contextualizing epistemologies, it brilliantly shows how ontologies emerge from various social ‘assemblages’.”<div>—<b>Marie Gaille</b>, philosopher, senior researcher, Université de Paris-CNRS</div><div><br></div><div>This book provides a solid basis to understand two centuries of bodily measurement practices and their scientific and political scope throughout the Western world. By exploring various cases, it proposes a new approach of measurement from an epistemological point of view and demonstrates the central role of the measurement of the body for political purposes. By studying categorizations of race, age and quality of life between the 19th and 20th century, the first part of the book highlights how human body measurements extend from the flesh to subjective experience. The second part shows how genomic correction and life support technologies reshape the frontiers between things, humans and social subjects. The final part reveals how contemporary measurements of age, race and disease gave rise to new hierarchies between human beings and social groups. The book concludes by considering different styles of measuring the body and their ontological consequences.</div>
Offers an original approach to the metrology of human bodies and to individual and group classification/identification, cutting across sociology, biomedical science, biotechnology studies and the anthropology of material culture Uniquely examines measurements of age, a topic so far neglected by researchers who have tended to focus on gender or racialization Alternating theoretical and historical contributions with contemporary case studies, this book will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and historians working in the fields of science, medicine, techniques, gender, racialization and age, and also postgraduate students following specialties in these fields and professionals or civil society actors intervening on these issues (NGOs, forensics, health practitioners, etc.)
<div>“This collection is more than a sum of its superb studies at various sites, ranging from bone age in nineteenth century forensic medicine to intensive care units today, of the measurement and mis-measurement of the human body.&nbsp; Together these studies provide a window into how we know and think about what it means, politically and ethically, to be embodied in the modern age.” (Thomas W. Laqueur, Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of California Berkeley)<br></div><div><br></div>“Why do you measure and why are&nbsp;<i>you</i>&nbsp;also measured? What measurement tools are used to offer a quantified vision of the body and its parts, its growth, and of human life itself? Is measurement the same thing as quantification? Based on in-depth historical investigations and case studies from the 19th century up to the present day, this book proposes enlightening answers to such questions. Combining basic insight from the ‘classics’—Foucault, Rose—on the political dimension of measurement with contextualizing epistemologies, it brilliantly shows how ontologies emerge from various social ‘assemblages’.”&nbsp;(Marie Gaille, philosopher, senior researcher, Université de Paris-CNRS)<div><br></div><div>“<i>From Measuring Rods to DNA Sequencing</i> is a masterful series of explorations into the biopolitics of bodily measurement, exposing the scientific truths of patterns, curves, averages, biomarkers, probabilities, weights, and standards as templates of imperialist modernity itself. Ingrid Voléry and Marie-Pierre Julien have created an inspiring text, compelling readers to rethink the power of quantifying knowledges in the history of human governance, while pointing ahead to liberating transformations of what it means to be human.” (Professor Stephen Katz, Trent University, Canada)<br></div><div><br></div>“This book splendidly shows to what extent the measurement of the body is a complex operation: it is part of a system of social transactions, it is shaped by situated configurations of knowledge, it organizes cognitive and technical conditions under which bodies can be scientifically appropriated. By rooting epistemological reflection in the historicity of tools, practices and institutional and disciplinary spaces, this book powerfully enriches the field of the political, social, and intellectual history of the modes of production of the body.” (Rafael Mandressi, historian, senior researcher, CNRS-EHESS)<br></div>

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