This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.

 

Readings

WEEK # READINGS
2

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. "Interpreting the History of Bloodletting." Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 11-46.

Buy at Amazon Daston, Lorraine, and Katherine Park. "Introduction," "The Topography of Wonder," "The Passions of Inquiry," and "The Enlightenment and the Anti-Marvelous." In Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750. Cambridge, MA: Zone, 2001, pp. 13-66 and 303-386. ISBN: 9780942299915.

Buy at Amazon Burnett, D. Graham. Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 1-18, 95-144, and 190-222. ISBN: 9780691129501.

3

Buy at Amazon Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. "Heredity—The Formation of an Epistemic Space." pp. 3-34; López-Beltrán, Carlos. "The Medical Origins of Heredity." pp. 105-132; Müller-Wille, Staffan. "Figures of Inheritance, 1650-1850." pp. 177-204; Duchesneau, François. "The Delayed Linkage of Heredity with the Cell Theory." pp. 293-314. In Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870. Edited by Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780262134767.

Buy at Amazon Richards, Robert J. "The Romantic Conception of Life," and "Darwin's Romantic Biology." In The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780226712116.

Buy at Amazon ———. "Evolutionary Morphology in the Darwinian Mode." In The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780226712161.

4

Helmreich, Stefan, and Sophia Roosth. "Life Forms: A Keyword Entry." (In preparation.)

Buy at Amazon Coleman, William. Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function and Transformation. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 1-15. ISBN: 9780521292931.

Buy at Amazon Foucault, Michel. "Classifying." In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001. ISBN: 9780415267366.

Buy at Amazon Beer, Gillian. "Introduction." In Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780521767699.

Buy at Amazon Foucault, Michel. "Right of Death and Power over Life." In The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. New York, NY: Vintage, 1990. ISBN: 9780679724698.

Buy at Amazon Rabinow, Paul. "Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality." In Incorporations. Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1992. ISBN: 9780942299304.

Rose, Nikolas. "The Politics of Life Itself." Theory, Culture & Society 18, no. 6 (2001): 1-30.

Helmreich, Stefan. "Species of Biocapital." Science as Culture 17, no. 4 (2008): 463-478.

5

Buy at Amazon Thurtle, Phillip. The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time and Information in American Biological Science, 1870-1920. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780295987507.

Buy at Amazon Keller, Evelyn Fox. "Synthetic Biology and the Origin of Living Form," and "Genes, Gene Action, and Genetic Programs." In Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780674012509.

Buy at Amazon de Chadarevian, Soraya. "Reconstructing Life," "Proteins, Crystals, and Computers," "Disciplinary Moves," and "Laboratory Cultures." In Designs for Life Molecular Biology after World War II. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 50-135, 199-235, and 264-299. ISBN: 9780521570787.

Buy at Amazon Doyle, Richard. "Mr. Schrödinger Inside Himself: The Rhetorical Origins of the Genetic Code," and "Allergies of Reading; DNA, Language, and the Problem of Origins." In On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 25-38 and 86-108. ISBN: 9780804727648.

6

Buy at Amazon Haraway, Donna. "Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture, Or It's All in the Family: Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century United States." In Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Edited by William Cronon. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1995. ISBN: 9780393038729.

Buy at Amazon Koenig, Barbara A., Sandra Soo-Jin Le, and Sarah S. Richardson, eds. Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. Chapel Hill, NC: Rutgers University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780813543246.

7

Rossi, Michael. "Judgment Against Authenticity: Cetology and Model-Making at the American Museum of Natural History, 1907-1974." Isis. (Forthcoming).

Buy at Amazon Shell, Hanna Rose/E. J. Marey. "Things Under Water: Etienne-Jules Marey's Aquarium Laboratory and Cinema's Assembly." In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005, pp. 326-331. ISBN: 9780262122795.

Buy at Amazon Martin, Emily. "The Woman in the Flexible Body." In Revisioning Women, Health and Healing. Edited by Adele Clarke and Virginia Olesen. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999, pp. 97-115.

Buy at Amazon Landecker, Hannah. "Introduction: Technologies of Living Substance," and "Epilogue: Cells Then and Now." In Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780674023284.

Buy at Amazon Franklin, Sarah. "Sex." In Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 19-45. ISBN: 9780822339205.

Lowe, Celia. "Making the Monkey: How the Togean Macaque Went from 'New Form' to 'Endemic Species' in Indonesians' Conservation Biology." Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 4 (2004): 491-516.

Myers, Natasha. "Molecular Embodiments and the Body-work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography." Social Studies of Science 38, no. 2 (2008): 163-199.

Buy at Amazon Haraway, Donna. "When Species Meet: Introductions," and "Crittercam." In When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780816650453.

8

Buy at Amazon Anderson, Warwick. The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780801890406.

Buy at Amazon Rapp, Rayna. "How Methodology Bleeds into Everyday Life," "Accounting for Amniocentesis," and "The Communication of Risk." In Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: A Social History of Amniocentesis in America. New York, NY: Routledge, 2000, pp. 1-77. ISBN: 9780415916455.

Epstein, Steven. "The Rise of 'Recruitmentology': Clinical Research, Racial Knowledge, and the Politics of Inclusion and Difference." Social Studies of Science 38, no. 5 (2008): 739-770.

9

Buy at Amazon Brandt, Allan. The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2007. ISBN: 9780465070473.

Buy at Amazon Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. "The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in 'Fresh' Organs." In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier. Boston, MA: Blackwell, 2004. ISBN: 9781405123587.

10

Petryna, Adriana. "Biological Citizenship: The Science and Politics of Chernobyl-Exposed Populations." Osiris 19 (2004): 250-265.

Buy at Amazon Lock, Margaret. "Displacing Suffering: The Reconstruction of Death in North America and Japan." In Death, Mourning and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader. Edited by A. Robben. Boston, MA: Blackwell, 2005. ISBN: 9781405114714.

Paxson, Heather. "Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Artisanal Raw Milk Cheese in the United States." Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2008): 15-47.

Schüll, Natasha Dow. "Balancing Acts," and "Managing the Sensorium." In Machine Zone: Technology and Compulsion in Las Vegas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Forthcoming).

11 Buy at Amazon Helmreich, Stefan. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780520250611.