J. I. Staley Prize 2004
In
2003, for the first time in its fifteen-year history, the J. I. Staley
Prize was awarded to two books: Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The
Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America, by Rayna Rapp, and No
Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things,
by Lawrence Cohen. The authors shared the $10,000 prize. Both books make
major contributions to the dynamic field of medical anthropology.
Testing
Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America,
by Rayna Rapp
(Routledge, 1999)
In
1983, cultural anthropologist Rayna Rapp set out to map the terrain of the
emerging technology of amniocentesis, a prenatal diagnostic test used to
screen fetuses for chromosomal anomalies and other problems. Over the
course of fifteen years, she studied the primary constituencies involved
with this new reproductive technology: geneticists, genetic counselors,
lab technicians, pregnant women and their supporters who used or refused
the test, women who ended their pregnancies following a positive
diagnosis, and parents of children with prenatally diagnosable
disabilities. Her book, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus, offers
"invaluable insights" into the first generation of
women-described by Rapp as moral pioneers-who had to decide whether or not
to terminate their pregnancies on the basis of amniocentesis results.
Prenatal diagnosis, Rapp writes, "forces each woman to act as a moral
philosopher of the limits, adjudicating the standards guarding entry into
the human community."
Throughout the book, Rapp remains cognizant of
race/ethnicity, class, religion, immigration status, and other social
factors that affect access to reproductive technology and that influence
women's decisions. "This ethnography does what so much research about
reproductive technologies fails to do—it
shows clearly that decision making about the termination of pregnancy is a
social act and not merely an individual decision," observed one
nominator.
Rapp's "strong voice and intrepid
analysis" center on three arguments. First, the practice of
amniocentesis is consistent with the stratification of reproduction along
social fault lines. Second, Americans use scientific knowledge in ways
that reinforce stratification based on class, religion, ethnicity,
education, and language. And third, society needs to foster better
communication between the realm of genetic testing and that of disability
rights. Lynn Morgan, reviewing the book for Medical Anthropology
Quarterly, called Rapp "one of the most eloquent feminist
anthropologists writing today," and Testing Women, Testing the
Fetus, a "tour de force."
"One of the most pressing problems for
anthropologists today is to come to grips with what our roles might be in
contributing to commentary on the development, implementation, and
assessment of new technologies of all kinds, such as genetically modified
foods, organ transplants, and germ-line engineering, all of which will
have far-reaching societal effects," said a nominator. "Rapp's
book must already be counted as a classic in this challenge for future
anthropological investigations."
Rayna
Rapp is a professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology
at New York University.
No
Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things,
by Lawrence Cohen
(University of California Press, 1998)
As
a medical anthropologist, Lawrence Cohen writes about age and "its
appearance and disappearance in the making of knowledge." An
examination of senility and the radically divergent narratives surrounding
it in North America and India are at the core of No Aging in India:
Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things, a book Cohen
describes as "rooted in a sense that our practices of thinking about
society, culture, the body, and the nature of our times would benefit from
a sustained attention to age as a kind of difference."
Cohen studied geriatric and gerontological
practice in the United States as a medical student before moving his
research to India, where he found no diagnostic counterpart to the North
American preoccupation with what has been labeled Alzheimer's disease.
Instead, emerging problems with the elderly were framed in
"postcolonial worries about the modern breakdown of the traditional
joint family as the socio-moral cause of demented behavior in old
people." Senility, according to this logic, occurs only when younger
family members have failed to properly care for their elders.
"Without denying the usefulness of
Alzheimer's as an explanation for a certain set of behaviors," said
an Anthropological Quarterly reviewer, "Cohen challenges us to
rethink the medicalization of old age that takes place when we reduce all
of the social, political, and existential complexities of aging to the
plaques and tangles of a biological brain disease." Reviewing for Choice,
S. A. Tyler wrote, "This intriguing book attempts to resolve the
oppositions between medically and culturally defined aging."
Hailed as "beautifully written and
analytically sophisticated," No Aging in India draws from a
panoply of sources: Western tabloid representations of Alzheimer's,
international gerontology conferences, medical texts from the U.S. and
India, ancient Indian epics, contemporary Hindi novels, and advertisements
for Ayurvedic old age tonics. In addition, Cohen conducted ethnographic
fieldwork in four neighborhoods of Varanasi.
While No Aging in India can be read
"for its powerful ethnographic descriptions of Indian old people and
their families and for its subtle analysis of the sociology and semiotics
of aging," said Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology,
"this exquisitely crafted book also offers a sophisticated non-reductionist
theorization of biology, culture, and economics."
Lawrence
Cohen is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and
the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley. He was an SAR Resident Scholar
Fellow in 2003-4.
Testing Women, Testing the Fetus and No Aging in India are two
of thirty-seven books reviewed by a five-member panel comprised of Linda
A. Bennett, University of Memphis; Charles L. Briggs, University of
California, San Diego; Agustin Fuentes, Notre Dame University; Rosemary A.
Joyce, University of California, Berkeley; David Nugent, Colby College.
After convening twice, the panel submitted its recommendation to SAR's
Board of Managers, which granted the award.
