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| 1 |
ID:
124958
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This essay is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Indian community in Houston, as part of a National Institutes of Health and the National Human Genome Research Institute-sponsored ethics study and sample collection initiative entitled 'Indian and Hindu Perspectives on Genetic Variation Research'. Taking a cue from my Indian interlocutors who largely support and readily respond to such initiatives on the grounds that they will undoubtedly serve 'humanity' and the common good, I explore notions of the commons that are created in the process of soliciting blood for genetic research. How does blood become the stuff of which a civic discourse is made? How do idealistic individual appeals to donate blood, ethics research protocols, open-source databases, debates on approaches to genetic research, patents and Intellectual Property regulations, markets and the nation-state itself variously engage, limit or further ideas of the common good? Moving much as my interlocutors do, between India and the USA, I explore the nature of the commons that is both imagined and pragmatically reckoned in both local and global diasporic contexts
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| 2 |
ID:
143550
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| Summary/Abstract |
Much has been said and written about the role of the mobile phone in modulating social behaviours and cultural dynamics in India. Far less attention has been paid, however, to emerging cultural narratives about the phone which showcase the active, often troublesome and intrusive role the device plays in increasingly technologically inflected lives and landscapes. How are we to understand these new readings of the phone as itself a protagonist in our cultural lives? This essay uses a series of cultural reference points (movies, plays, news-media reports, popular music) to survey new metaphoric and symbolic terrains that the mobile phone guides us through. The mobile device's character, I argue, is totemic: it acquires the capacity to express desires, aspirations, and ambivalences; invoke social differences, and assert cultural norms. What Indian cultural narratives reveal is the desire for communion with the technologies which now both contain our natures and hold them up to view. The mobile phone plays a critical role in this process of reflection and self-making.
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