Biomedical Techniques in Context: On the Appropriation of Biomedical Procedures and Artifacts

On the assumption that technical practices and artifacts are fundamental constituents of individual and collective attempts to order lives and bodies in health and sickness, in this introduction, we set out three central propositions. First, medical techniques have to take center stage in research on biomedicine. Second, as medical artifacts travel worldwide, they become part of the processes of sociocultural appropriation. Third, anthropologists have to consider how to study the transformations associated with such appropriation and how much they need to know about the technical aspects of their objects of study. The mutual transformative potential of both biomedical artifacts and practices and the new contexts of application have so far been undertheorized in medical anthropology--a gap that we aim to close with our reflections and the collection of empirical studies of various biomedical techniques in this issue.