Introduction

While the study of “medicine and culture” has a long tradition within social studies and the humanities (e.g., medical anthropology, medical sociology, and history and philosophy of medicine), this volume examines “(bio-)medicine as culture” from a contemporary, science studies-based perspective. It refl ects the growing impact of technology in medical research and routine practices and their increasing intertwinedness with other life sciences like genomics or neurosciences.1 This perspective engages new questions regarding the relation between biomedicine and its cultural context, which implies new dynamics between local and global worlds of knowledge, technology, and practice (Good 1995, 2001). The genetic assumptions of biomedicine reconfi gure the boundaries not only between nature and culture in the life sciences but also in society in general when reencoding the categories of health and illness, of normality and pathology. At the same time, predictive diagnostic methods become more and more important. Speaking of “genetic risks” and “genetic responsibility” raises fundamental questions about cultural backgrounds of biomedical practices and its consequences for society and people’s identities, bringing up issues of “emergent forms of life” (Fischer 2003; Rose, this volume).