Genetics, biosocial groups & the future of identity
By I. Hacking. Daedalus, 2006
113 citations recorded by the source corpus.
gree, although brief, is the best. Paul Rabinow, the anthropologist of the genome industry, wrote about ‘biosociality’ in 1992.1 He invented the word partly as a joke, to counter the sociobiology that had been fashionable for some time. When he wrote, Rabinow was interested in groups and the criteria around which they form. Of course, human beings are biosocial beings: biological animals and social animals. But the fact that many groups of people can be loosely characterized in both biological and social ways, and that the ‘bio’ and the ‘social’ reinforce each other, prompted his term. This phenomenon is immediately evident: what are families or extended kinship structures if not biosocial groups? Currently, the genetic imperative–the drive to 1⁄2nd biological, but above all genetic, underpinnings for all things human, in sickness or in health, in success or in strife–is fueling fascination with this concept.
Subfields: Genetics, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2e80968004cbb0c78d4a87ba1f27023ee3346ac3
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Genetics
In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Citations in the corpus
- Narrative and the Cultural Psychology of Identity (2008, background): “…the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, devoted to identity, of the nine scholars invited to contribute, five were philosophers, and the remaining scholars were historians, political scientists, or scholars in religious studies (e.g., Appiah, 2006; Bilgrami, 2006; Doniger, 2006; Hacking, 2006).”
- Race: a social destruction of a biological concept (2010, background): “(Hacking 2005, 104) As yet another indication of how quickly this research area is moving forward, Hacking has backpedalled considerably in an article published just 1 year later, adopting a much more guarded tone and now explicitly conceding that ‘‘stereotypical features of race are associated both”