“The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word “life.”  They used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or group.”  Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.

 

 

Rationale for Project Biocultures

 

Project Biocultures seeks to provide an intellectual space for research, conferences, intellectual exchange and diffusion of ideas around the emerging area of biocultures.  Bicocultures, deliberately placed in the plural to avoid the idea that there is only one kind of culture involved, comprise the emerging area bounded by the medical sciences, social sciences, area studies, culture studies, biotechnology, disability studies, the humanities, and the economic and global environment.  Biocultures defines the activity and consolidation of ideas created when the human intersects with the technological.  Along these lines, one can see the biosphere—the earth as it is affected by the human--as the adaptation of the natural to the human and biocultures as the inter-adaptation of the human to the new technologies and ways of knowing characterized by the 21st century’s attitude toward the body. 

            This Center represents a deliberate attempt to provide a location for a set of activities that have been proceeding in a somewhat uncoordinated manner over the past 25 years.  These activities have operated around the body in its social, political, cultural, and scientific aspects.  While various disciplines have arisen--notably discourses including public health, medical education, medical humanities, bioethics, criminal justice, epidemiology, identity and body studies, medical anthropology, medical sociology, history of medicine, philosophy of medicine, and so on, no single one of these disciplines fully articulates the range of possibilities of bioculture.  In fact, scholars working in these disparate areas often find themselves alone within their departments and specializations. Biocultures aims to provide not only an intellectual space for these scholars but also a sense of an emerging common discipline with like aims and goals.

            Various intellectual periods have seen specific discourses that develop and provide the contemporary lens through which the culture and society can best be seen.  In the 18th century both classical studies and philosophy were seen as the universal lenses through which society could be understood best.  In the 19th century the discourse of science, medicine, and psychology emerged in addition to philosophy.  In the 20th century various psycho-socio models came forward, and most recently "theory" was the dominant discourse.  Now, it seems that the current moment is one in which the biocultural has moved to the fore as the prime area of cultural and theoretical analysis.  A brief glance at any newspaper will reveal that on any given day the biocultural issue has garnered major space in the news.  Pandemics like SARS and AIDS, the burdens of health care, the emergence of globalized drug regimens, the rights of patients, the attention to the physical aspect of the body--appearance, personal health, the health consequences of war, famine, the development of the human genome and its impact on identity, issues around the female body, the queer body, the racialized body, and so on are daily written as the long story of human corporeal and mental existence are inserted into the social political realm.   More and more we do see formerly social-political issues, such as race, gender, sexual identity and identity in general, subsumed under the scientific/medical discourses of genetics, biochemistry, prescription drugs, social and public policy.

            In 1959, C. P. Snow articulated the notion of “the two cultures,” noting the split in Western culture between science and the humanities.  This split developed in the 19^th century when science and the humanities sought to distinguish each from the other for various professional and methodological reasons.  While Snow may have been correct in mid twentieth-century, by the 21^st century these discourses have come together in the emerging area of the biocultural.  In some sense, the fusion has occurred ahead of a disciplinary way of noting and analyzing this merger.  Consequently, the university is still maintaining, on a formal basis through the organization of departments, professional organizations, and journals, this split while individual scholars and others have moved in the direction of a new kind of interdisciplinarity.  This interdisciplinarity has come about not out of an administrative imperative but out of a necessity—one needs a complex knowledge of both areas to understand the major issues facing humanity with the advent of various global bio-technologies combined with multi-national corporate imperatives.

Molecular genetics and the sequencing of the human genome provide a perfect environment to explore the role of biocultures.  In the area of human genetics, the approach in which researchers can pursue pure research is complicated by the social, cultural, and economic factors that come into play when genetics and disease combine.  As a recent review article noted, “Despite the typical desire of geneticists to be left alone to do their work, even the most abstract of theoretical biologists cannot stay within objective considerations because this subject, from sampling choices onward, is essentially embedded in its cultural context.” [1] The creation of a Center on Biocultures serves to acknowledge the need for an institutionalization of this emergence of a fusion culture based on a mutual need for scholarship and analysis of the nexus between the body and technology.

            Biocultures assumes that there are diverse ways of knowing and understanding the workings of the body and mind, the these are primarily culturally derived, and that expert ways of knowing can produce certain strong results but do not have exclusive purview over the body and the mind. Biocultures seeks to develop and encourage these ways of knowing not only on the part of experts but also on the part of those whose bodies and minds are the subject of study.  Thus patients, indigenous peoples, minority identity groups and so on are encouraged to participate in their study and self-study, as well as their treatment on a full range of issues from personal health to public health to corporate and globalized approaches to various populations’ needs.  An informed knowledge of the scientific discourse and the bases for knowledge is crucial for non-scientists, patients, and interested scholars.  To this aim, biocultures implies a double-way of knowing from science to the humanities and back again.

Biocultures will realign the contemporary division between right and left.  On issues like the sanctity of life, a topic controlled by the conservative right, a biocultural perspective that questions certain interventions done in the name of molecular biology, inserting genes into plant and animal life, using prenatal technologies to abort female fetuses, removing feeding tubes from people with severe disabilities, are all areas in which the standard right/left paradigm seems not to operate.  As with any major paradigm shift, the consequences for future generations must be examined.

            Biocultures wishes to emphasize that while in the past certain regnant paradigms of thinking--including the economic, psychological, philosophical, political, and cultural-- dominated the intellectual and social marketplace of ideas, now these notions are not sufficient on their own to command a full discourse.  These will now have to include the bio-in their assessments.  Thus, one cannot discuss the economics of oppression without pointing out the involvement of the body, the health system, the defining terms of normality and abnormality, in such a discussion.  From the other side of the spectrum, humanities will be incomplete without an active understanding of the way that science, technology, psychology, for example, impinge on the formation of cultural productions.  It is important to note that what is being advocated is not a thematic understanding of literature through knowing about science or medicine but a discursive understanding of the emergence of cultural forms through the crucible of scientificized and medicalized discourses.  Thus, we could not have Dostoyevsky without the 19th century development of psychological and neurological theory.  We could not have racialized discourses without the involvement of science, and we could not have Dickens without a complex social and political discussions of degeneracy and eugenics.   Likewise, we could not have Freud without Dickens and Goethe.  And we could not have neurology without George Eliot, as we could not have telegraph and electrical lines without the discovery of nerves.

Project Biocultures at the University of Illinois at Chicago is conceived to address this state of affairs.  On a campus-wide level, Project Biocultures will begin by providing interdisciplinary occasions for discussion and development.  Allied faculty in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the School of Medicine, the School of Applied Health Sciences, the School of Education and others will be part of an advisory board.  Project Biocultures will begin its activities with a Fall 2003 conference around the issues raised by Howard University's decision to start a databank of the genetic information on American citizens of African descent.  The conference will have speakers from Howard University, from FirstGenetic Trust, the Chicago-based biotech company that will manage the databank, and from a range of scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and medical sciences who will discuss this decision and the issues surrounding race in the age of molecular genetics. (For further information go to:   http://www.uic.edu/orgs/uicsymrg/uicsymrg .)

A second conference, in collaboration with BIOS at the London School of Economics and its director Prof. Nikolas Rose, is being planned for Spring 2005 to explore the emerging area of biocultures.  (For further information go to: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BIOS/Default.htm

Project Biocultures will provide occasions for UIC faculty and students, as well as scholars throughout the United States and the world, to discuss these matters.  Working with the Humanities Laboratory, the Humanities Center, Project Biocultures will encourage interdisciplinary research that helps link the disparate parts of the campus.  It will also seek to establish a lecture series as well as a series of books published under its aegis by a major university press. Taking an activist stance, Project Biocultures will seek to influence legislation and research protocols to include a biocultural perspective.  It will aim to provide position papers and information dossiers on signal issues in the biocultural realm.  Project Biocultures website at http://www.uic.edu/orgs/uicsymrg/uicsymrg will list its activities and with further modifications will encourage dialogue and interactivity.

            The founder and director of Project Biocultures is Professor Lennard J. Davis who holds appointments in the Department of English in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Department of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences, and the Department of Medical Education in the School of Medicine.