Open AccessHUMANITY/PLAN; OR, ON THE “STATELESS” TODAY (ALSO BEING AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF GLOBAL HEALTH)
Author(s) -
REES TOBIAS
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
cultural anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.669
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 1548-1360
pISSN - 0886-7356
DOI - 10.14506/ca29.3.02
Subject(s) - humanity , plan (archaeology) , politics , environmental ethics , sociology , political science , history , law , philosophy , archaeology
My fieldwork among HIV vaccine researchers, activists, and funders has led me to suggest that humanity—when it was first conceived of in the late eighteenth century—emerged as a plan, a plan for how to establish a future anticipated in the present. The powerful implication of this fieldwork‐based suggestion is that what humanity is—or if it is at all—depends on the available humanity plans. I argue in this essay that we are currently seeing the emergence of a new—a biological—humanity plan, and I wish to make visible that—and how—this biological humanity plan has outgrown, conceptually as well as institutionally, older humanity plans. I also hope to make comprehensible the massive—intellectual as well as political—challenge this emergence poses.