| View Larger Image | Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos | Paperbackby Lynn Morgan (Author)
| List Price: | $21.95 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | University of California Press | | Edition: | 1st Edition | | Page Count: | 328 Pages | | Publication Date: | September 09, 2009 | | Sales Rank: | 796,135th |
|
FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780520260443
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
|
EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Icons of Life tells the engrossing and provocative story of an early twentieth-century undertaking, the Carnegie Institution of Washington's project to collect thousands of embryos for scientific study. Lynn M. Morgan blends social analysis, sleuthing, and humor to trace the history of specimen collecting. In the process, she illuminates how a hundred-year-old scientific endeavor continues to be felt in today's fraught arena of maternal and fetal politics. Until the embryo collecting project-which she follows from the Johns Hopkins anatomy department, through Baltimore foundling homes, and all the way to China-most people had no idea what human embryos looked like. But by the 1950s, modern citizens saw in embryos an image of "ourselves unborn," and embryology had developed a biologically based story about how we came to be. Morgan explains how dead specimens paradoxically became icons of life, how embryos were generated as social artifacts separate from pregnant women, and how a fetus thwarted Gertrude Stein's medical career. By resurrecting a nearly forgotten scientific project, Morgan sheds light on the roots of a modern origin story and raises the still controversial issue of how we decide what embryos mean. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 1 review)
|
Creative, disorienting, compelling! Morgan exhumes important history by RC (NY, NY)  5 Stars
September 29, 2009
Lynn Morgan creatively presents early 20th century embryo science and society in ways that invite us to see embryos, fetuses and their progenitors (women, men, scientists alike) in new and productively disorienting ways. She cleverly builds on feminist social science literature and highlights exciting areas for explorations. For instance, she challenges scholars to explore the "hidden sources" of embryo production, asking how they came to exist and were materialized. This, in itself, is a compelling directive, though the details of her historical ethnography makes the best argument for how to do this and why it is so important. The stories of Mrs. R and Carnegie no. 836 so strikingly and smartly show how invisibilized women's labor and contributions to embryo collecting were. Illustrating this through documenting the multiple dead-ends in Mrs. R's history - like facing the sad fact that Morgan could not find her gravestone in the hills of West Virginia - helps to re-entangle Mrs. R with Carnegie no. 836's long and well-documented story.
Icons of Life is solid and intriguing scholarship that gives readers a lot to think about in our contemporary "embryo-centric political climate." Also, as a teacher, I look forward to using this book to help complicate and put into relief some deeply entrenched assumptions about fetuses, women, life/death, and science. The clarity of Morgan's argument and the abundance of engaging examples makes this text well-suited for the classroom.
| |
SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes (Women in Culture and Society Series)
by Mary Weismantel (Author)
Winner of the 2003 Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society.
Cholas and Pishtacos are two provocative characters from South American popular culture—a sensual mixed-race woman and a horrifying white killerwho show up in everything from horror stories and dirty jokes to romantic novels and travel posters. In this elegantly written book, these two figures become vehicles for an exploration of race, sex, and violence that pulls the reader into the vivid landscapes and...
| 
| Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas
by Stefan Helmreich (Author)
Alien Ocean immerses readers in worlds being newly explored by marine biologists, worlds usually out of sight and reach: the deep sea, the microscopic realm, and oceans beyond national boundaries. Working alongside scientists at sea and in labs in Monterey Bay, Hawai'i, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Sargasso Sea and at undersea volcanoes in the eastern Pacific, Stefan Helmreich charts how revolutions in genomics, bioinformatics, and remote sensing have pressed marine...
| 
| The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand
by Alan Klima (Author)
The Funeral Casino is a heretical ethnography of the global age. Setting his book within Thailand's pro-democracy movement and the street massacres that accompanied it, Alan Klima offers a strikingly original interpretation of mass-mediated violence through a study of funeral gambling and Buddhist meditation on death. The fieldwork for the book began in 1992, when a freewheeling market of illegal "massacre-imagery" videos blossomed in Bangkok on the very site where, days earlier, for the...
| 
| The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity (Cultural Memory in the Present)
by Stuart McLean (Author)
The Event and its Terrors undertakes a critical reimagining of one of the major events of Irish history—the Great Famine of the 1840s—and of its subsequent legacies. Drawing on a wide range of sources, past and present, it considers the emergence of the Famine as an object of historical knowledge and controversy with reference both to the experience of modernity and to the production of academic and nationalist histories in colonial and post-independence Ireland. In doing so, it explores...
| 
| Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
by Karen Ho (Author)
Financial collapses--whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market--are often explained as the inevitable results of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes...
|
|
|
