Description
Book SynopsisIn the 1980s, a research team led by Parisian scientists identified several unique DNA sequences, or haplotypes, linked to sickle cell anemia in African populations. This title traces how this genetic discourse has blotted from view the roles that Senegalese patients and doctors have played in making sickle cell 'mild' in a social setting.
Trade ReviewWinner of the 2014 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology, American Anthropological Association Winner of the 2011 Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology, Royal Anthropological Institute "Duana Fullwiley has produced an extraordinary work that incorporates the insights of anthropology as well as science and technology studies of genetics and race. It is also exceptional in its multi-sited focus on Senegal and France, since many similar studies of genetics have tended to focus on the US and Europe."--Elisha P. Renne, Anthropological Quarterly "The Enculturated Gene is the product of over ten years of research beginning in the late 1990s. The book is stunning in its scope and attention to a full range of issues, from discoveries in the lab to knowledge production in the clinic to global health responses... By elucidating ethnographically the contingencies that have produced the local and global health responses to sickle cell disease, Fullwiley shows us that health policy is as much a product of culture and subjectivity as affective responses to physical and existential pain."--Carolyn Rouse, Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations viii Preface ix Acknowledgments xxv Chapter One: Introduction: The Powers of Association 1 Chapter Two: Healthy Sicklers with "Mild" Disease: Local Illness Aff ects and Population- Level Eff ects 45 Chapter Three: The Biosocial Politics of Plants and People 77 Chapter Four: Attitudes of Care 119 Chapter Five: Localized Biologies: Mapping Race and Sickle Cell Difference in French West Africa 158 Chapter Six: Ordering Illness: Heterozygous "Trait" Suff ering in the Land of the Mild Disease 197 Chapter Seven: The Work of Patient Advocacy 221 Conclusion: Economic and Health Futures amid Hope and Despair 250 Notes 275 References 307 Index 329
