ABSTRACT
One of the recurrent themes in the social science literature on the body has been the ‘naturalness’ of the body. Is there a biophysical or corporeal body unaffected by social processes and power relations? To what extent is ‘nature’ subject to control by ‘culture’? And, what are the political and practical implications of efforts to achieve such control? I suggested in Chapter 1 that technological developments have unsettled the idea of a clear separation between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and hence of the existence of a natural or pre-social body. According to the tenets of evolutionary theory, the body is subject to change and adaptation over a very long period of time as a result of environmental pressures. It could be argued then that technology as a cultural artefact simply accelerates and directs processes of change and adaptation that would inevitably occur due to environmental pressures. Thus, genetic modifications affected through screening or new therapies may be seen to advance the process of making people more adaptive to their ever-changing environments. Some scientists indeed argue this in relation to so-called germ-line genetic engineering, which they see as having the potential to eliminate disease from the human gene pool (see Stock and Campbell 2000). As I also mentioned in Chapter 1, the idea of changing or perfecting the body is by no means novel. However, recent developments, or at least their portrayal, suggest that control of ‘nature’ through technological intervention is now realisable and imminent. Science derives much of its legitimacy from the claim that it can control and alter ‘nature’ in ways that will benefit people and there are great expectations within many contemporary societies that it will deliver what is promised. This impression is reinforced especially by media reporting which offers almost daily news stories of technological ‘breakthroughs’. In this chapter, I critically examine the nature-culture debate with reference to two fields of research that recently have been in the news and which are portrayed as having the potential to substantially change the way we think about and treat the body, namely neuroscience and embryonic stem cell research. Both areas are contentious precisely because they are seen to allow control over fundamental processes of life and to have the potential to radically transform human lives in the future. This chapter examines how these developments are represented and
in particular the expectations attached to them. Given the long history of interest in changing the body, it is useful to begin however by locating the nature-culture debate in a historical and social context.
