Given their commitment to practices, science studies have bestowed considerable attention upon objects. We have the boundary object, the standardized package, the network object, the immutable mobile, the fluid object, even a fire object has entered the scene. However, these objects do not provide us with a way of understanding their historicity. They are timeless, motionless pictures rather than things that change over time, and while enacting ‘historical moments’ they do not make visible the histories they contain within them. What (...) kind of object could embody history and make that history visible? Inspired by Michel Serres, I suggest the folded object is a way to attend to the temporality and spatiality of objects. In this article I explore this new object by unravelling the history of a DNA reference sequence. I show how, ever since it was produced in the early 1980s, attempts have been made to filter race out of the sequence. That effort has failed due to what one could call ‘political noise’. Making and remaking the sequence have left traces that cannot be erased. (shrink)

This article explores the contemporary scientific practice of human genome science in light of Michel Foucault’s articulation of the problem of population. Rather than transcending the politics of social categories and identities, human genome research mobilizes many different kinds of populations. How then might we aim to avoid overgeneralized readings of the refiguring of human difference in the life sciences and grapple with the multiple and contradictory logics of population classification? In exploring the study of human variation through the case (...) of the ‘Quebec founder population’ at a private genome research laboratory in Canada, the article argues that the power to define and shape meanings of human variation and to organize vitality is not held by any one institution or form of scientific practice. While molecular genomics may be transforming conceptions of human difference, the laboratory is only one of many places where human genomic variation accrues value, meaning and relevance. Molecular configurations of human difference gain meaning through a traffic in populations that extends beyond the laboratory. In the case explored here this traffic in populations is constituted within a nexus of empire, national census practices and contemporary articulations of multicultural policies. (shrink)

The Body Multiple is an extraordinary ethnography of an ordinary disease. Drawing on fieldwork in a Dutch university hospital, Annemarie Mol looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. A patient information leaflet might describe atherosclerosis as the gradual obstruction of the arteries, but in hospital practice this one medical condition appears to be many other things. From one moment, place, apparatus, specialty, or treatment, to the next, a slightly different “atherosclerosis” is being discussed, measured, observed, or stripped away. (...) This multiplicity does not imply fragmentation; instead, the disease is made to cohere through a range of tactics including transporting forms and files, making images, holding case conferences, and conducting doctor-patient conversations. The Body Multiple juxtaposes two distinct texts. Alongside Mol’s analysis of her ethnographic material—interviews with doctors and patients and observations of medical examinations, consultations, and operations—runs a parallel text in which she reflects on the relevant literature. Mol draws on medical anthropology, sociology, feminist theory, philosophy, and science and technology studies to reframe such issues as the disease-illness distinction, subject-object relations, boundaries, difference, situatedness, and ontology. In dialogue with one another, Mol’s two texts meditate on the multiplicity of reality-in-practice. Presenting philosophical reflections on the body and medical practice through vivid storytelling, The Body Multiple will be important to those in medical anthropology, philosophy, and the social study of science, technology, and medicine. (shrink)