Ryan Griffis on Mon, 26 Jan 2004 04:13:12 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> RE: The DNA of Culture |
Dr. Thacker's account of the NOVA show recalls a couple of things for me. 1. i saw an IMAX film a couple of years ago on cave climbing set in South America. The film followed a narrative of a research doctor looking for potential botanical medicines in the rainforest (what else), and was like a giant, literally, commercial for glaxo, smith-kline (who, naturally funded the entire production - IMAX's are apparently way too expensive to make to be anything but commercials). but anyway, the "point" of the movie (achieved through complete visual awe and calming narration) was that the answer was for Western pharma to "crack" the code of non-Western culture and seperate the myth from the medicine. So, you end up with questions like "how does this leaf prevent cancer in indigenous populations?" and, no one says "well gee, their entire lifestyle is completely different. maybe that has something to do with it. they don't have pharmaceutical companies making drugs to solve the problems of the PCBs they dumped in the watershed in the 70s." 2. the genetic anthropologist looking for evidence of the master narrative that's already been a staple of anthropological education for at least 25 years, and wants to formulate race as a cultural construct while using DNA samples from, well, different races to prove it. Jackie Stevens has a great article on this called "Symbolic Matter: DNA and other linguistic stuff" http://www.jacquelinestevens.org/articlesessays.htm ryan __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net