Michael M. J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His most recent books include Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry and Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (winner of the American Ethnological Society’s Senior Book Prize), both also published by Duke University Press.
Prologue ix
1. Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems 1
2. Four Cultural Genealogies (or Haplotype Genealogical Tests) for a
Recombinant Anthropology of Science and Technology 51
3. Emergent Forms of (Un)Natural Life 114
4. Body Marks (Bestial/Natural/Divine): An Essay on the Social and
Biotechnical Imaginaries, 1920-2008, and Bodies to Come 159
5. Personhood and Measuring the Figure of Old Age: The Geoid as
Transitional Object 197
6. Ask Not What Man Is But What We May Expect of Him 215
Conclusions and Way Ahead: Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopolitics, and
Anthropological Futures 235
Epilogue: Postings from Anthropologies to Come 244
Notes 273
References 331
Index 379
