Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses culture, society concept, magic, production concept, kinship, and mechanisms of exchange. For some time now, developments in science, health, and technology have provided fertile analytical ground for social science disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. Innovations in genetic therapies, advanced pharmaceutical interventions, surgical techniques and personalized medicine, to name but a few, have resurrected a (re)turn to positivism, behaviourism, sociobiology, liberal debates on the ownership of the self, as well as a historical/contextual recalibrations of population, racial and socioeconomic differences. In other words, transformations in science and technology have reanimated much older controversies, sites of interpretive conflict and disputes over how best to think about the relationship between society and nature including ways of thinking we may have thought were consigned to history.