Biomedical Technologies
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Biomedical Technologies
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Biomedical Technologies Anthropological Approaches Margaret Lock
INTRODUCTION The history of technology1 has usually been transmitted in Europe and North America as an heroic tale about the conquest of the enemy, whether this be aspects of the human or natural worlds—a narrative of progress, and of the betterment of social life in general. This has been characterized as the Standard View of technology (Pfaffenbergger, 1992), one which assumes that necessity is the mother of invention, causing humans to produce tools, devices, and artifacts that permit us, we believe, increasingly rational, autonomous, and prosperous lives, liberated from the constraints imposed by individual biology, oppressive human enemies, and the environment. It has been suggested that inherent to the Standard View are two sets of tacit meanings that at first glance appear to be contradictory. The first assumes that the relationship of humans to technology is too obvious to need examination. Organizations, industries, technicians, craftspeople, and so on simply make things that are in themselves neither good nor bad. The second approach, one of technological determinism, conceives of technology as a powerful and autonomous agent, inherent to progress, and therefore by definition an unquestionable good, but that inevitably dictates the form to be followed by human social life (see, for example, Heilbroner, 1967). Marshall Sahlins (1976) takes a very different approach. For him neither technologies nor the human
“needs” they are devised to alleviate should be conceptualized as autonomous, but must inevitably be understood as embedded in cultures and histories. Cultural analyses of technology are concerned with the attribution of meaning to technologies and their application, and hence with “entrenched moral imperatives” (Pfaffenberger, 1992, p. 506). The politics of national, community, and individual identity making is intimately associated with the development, global transfer, and implementation of socio-technical artifacts and systems. Pfaffenberger concludes that “when we examine the ‘imp
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