Biocare Product Catalogue (original) (raw)

Systems Thinking Analyses for Health Policy and Systems Development, 2021

Recent anthropological work on biomedical technologies, deals with personhood (Squier 2004), processes of identity formation (Martin 2007), the varied forms of human and non-human connectedness (Rock and Babinec 2008), the impacts of political economies on health technologies and healing performances (Delvecchio Good 2001), economic exchanges based on human tissue trading (Waldby and Mitchell 2006; Thacker 2005) and the context-specific elaboration of moral worlds of treatment (Battles and Manderson 2008). Our focus for this chapter is instead to explore biotechnology and care because much of the recent work attends to the " high tech/low touch " end of the biotechnology spectrum. While assemblages such as tele-medicine, the new genetics, reproductive medicine, new imaging modalities, and transplant surgeries have been enthusiastically investigated by anthropologists; this has often left the analysis of the mundane caring techniques and technologies at the low-tech end of the spectrum to be conducted by the natives. A further characteristic of this recent literature has been the sustained focus on the hybrid personhood developed between patients and technologies, leading to something of a neglect of the similarly complex but under-researched personhoods created between practitioners and technologies, or both groups together. By combining our recent work in the specific local context of Aotearoa/New Zealand however, we have the opportunity to think anthropologically about some of these less studied issues. Furthermore by selecting a perspective from outside the USA and the UK, we can, in doing so, reflect our interests in local biologies (Lock 2001) and also in voice and dominance in the field of medical anthropology itself. To begin with some definitions, the word " biotechnology " encompasses material devices designed for specific medical functions and the techniques for using them which include the " background practices and treatment rituals in which a given device acquires its meaning " (Brodwin 2000:2). Brodwin writes that value and meaning are