Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life

"Reading Kaushik Sunder Rajan's Biocapital fills me with the same intellectual and personal excitement I felt reading Marx's Capital and Foucault's History of Sexuality for the first time. Biocapital gives a passionate, thoroughly argued road map to dense and consequential worlds that I already inhabit, but have not known how to describe with the vividness and acumen required. Sunder Rajan integrates and explores in depth what many others only promise; i.e., the coproductions of meanings, values, and bodies in emerging regimes of biocapital. In the course of shaping ethnographic and theoretical inquiry into what he calls 'lively capital,' Sunder Rajan gives his readers lively value in every sense."--Donna Haraway, author of Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan(c)_Meets_OncoMouse' "Biocapital is an ambitious book; its conceptual scope has the potential to remake conversation in the human sciences. There is really nothing like the argument and synthesis Kaushik Sunder Rajan provides, which is surprising given how important his topic is."--Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things "Biocapital is excellent. It offers new insight into both late capitalism and the life sciences and also provides material and arguments for rethinking foundational concepts such as 'valuation' and 'exchange.'"--Kim Fortun, author of Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders "This ambitious work is multi-sited, drawing from ethnographic work in the United States and in India as well as from within various organizations involved in the genomic world...it is an interesting book where terms are carefully defined and the approaches and theoretical perspectives are laid bare. It would be a great book for an advanced course in medical anthropology or technology studies." Cameron Adams, University of Kent