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Paula Louro Morgado (2019). The Fetishism of Biotechnology in Medical Anthropology Field. Being There. Medical Anthropology in Action - 10th MAYS.

P. C. Morgado,  "The Fetishism of Biotechnology in Medical Anthropology Field", in Being There. Medical Anthropology in Action - 10th MAYS, Torino, 2019

@misc{morgado2019_1776291396777,
	author = "Paula Louro Morgado",
	title = "The Fetishism of Biotechnology in Medical Anthropology Field",
	year = "2019",
	howpublished = "Digital",
	url = "https://mayseasa.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/mays-program-4-5-july-2019-.pdf"
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - The Fetishism of Biotechnology in Medical Anthropology Field
T2  - Being There. Medical Anthropology in Action - 10th MAYS
AU  - Paula Louro Morgado
PY  - 2019
CY  - Torino
UR  - https://mayseasa.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/mays-program-4-5-july-2019-.pdf
AB  - A theoretical bias in favor of biomedical paradigm has been observed in Medical Anthropological field since its early days. This tendency was understandable until late 1960s. Medical Anthropology has emerged as a consequence of biomedical healthcare expansion at global level. However, a deep epistemological renewal was expected in the wake of medical pluralism and biomedicine conceptualization as a cultural phenomenon. The opposite was instead observed. Positivist assumptions have been reinforced with the rise of Critical Medical Anthropology in the 1980s. Critical evaluation of health programs and advocacy for equitable access to quality public healthcare has intensified the biomedicalization of wellbeing, although biomedical limitations and iatrogenic effects. In the past few decades, biotechnological omnipresence in people's lives has increased academic interest in biomedical healthcare glocalization. Interests in political and identitary transformations causes by clinical interventions, such as assisted medical procreation or sexual redesignation surgery, relegated studies focused on therapeutic diversity to a second rank, despite its permanent update with global historical forces.
Through literature review this paper aims to discuss biotechnology’s contributions to the ideological subordination of Medical Anthropology to biomedical paradigm. Although biotechnology is theoretically conceived as a cultural manifestation, in practice is analyzed and treated differently from other medical procedures. Its unique ability to counteract biological predestination tends to blur the fact that is a product of a particular historical process used by political power to cope with capitalist challenges and social contradictions. This pattern is similar to that observed among positivist supports who advocate biomedicine’s neutrality based on biological tangibility, denying its political and historical dimension. It will be concluded that this theoretical bias affects how ethnographic data are analyzed and collected. And because of that, theory is unable to criticize political agendas concerned with biomedicalization of bodies as a solution to manage unequal distribution of resources.

ER  -