Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T05:36:52.262Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Life Begins When They Steal Your Bicycle”: Cross-Cultural Practices of Personhood at the Beginnings and Ends of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Lynn M. Morgan
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A friend once told me I was wasting my time writing about cross-cultural perspectives on the beginnings of life. “Your work is interesting for its curiosity value,” he said, “but fundamentally worthless. What happens in other cultures is totally irrelevant to what is happening here.” Those were discouraging words, but as I followed the American debates about the beginnings and ends of life, it seemed he was right. Anthropologists have written a great deal about birth and death rites in other societies and about non-western notions of personhood, but to date our findings have had little impact on American policy, ethics, or law. The recognized experts on contentious topics such as abortion and euthanasia tend to come from the fields of philosophy, bioethics, theology, law, and biology, but rarely from the social sciences. I was a bit surprised, therefore, to be invited to address the Thomas A. Pitts Memorial Lectureship on “Defining the Beginning and the End of Human Life.”

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Spring 2006 , pp. 8 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Taylor, J. S., “Confronting ‘Culture’ in Medicine's ‘Culture of No Culture,’” Academic Medicine 78 (2003): 555–559; Taylor, J. S., “The Story Catches You and You Fall Down: Tragedy, Ethnography, and ‘Cultural Competence,’” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17 (2003): 159–81; Denberg, T. Welch, M. and Feldman, M. D., “Cross-Cultural Communication,” in Feldman, M. D. and Christensen, J. F., eds., Behavioral Medicine in Primary Care: A Practical Guide, 2nd edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 2003): at 103–113.Google Scholar
Fadiman, A., The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997).Google Scholar
Trostle, J. A., Epidemiology and Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Brodwin, P., “Pluralism and Politics in Global Bioethics Education,” Annals of Behavioral Science and Medical Education 7 (2001): 80–86; Hoffmaster, B., “Can Ethnography Save the Life of Medical Ethics?” Social Science and Medicine 35 (1992): 1421–32; Kleinman, A., “Anthropology of Bioethics,” in Kleinman, A., Writing at the Margin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 41–67; Koenig, B. and Marshall, P., “Anthropology and Bioethics,” in Post, S. G., ed., Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 3rd edition (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004): 215–25; Mann, P. S., “Meanings of Death,” in Battin, M. P. Rhodes, R., and Silvers, A., eds.,Physician Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate (New York: Routledge, 1998); Morgan, L. M., “Fetal Relationality in Feminist Philosophy: An Anthropological Critique,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 11, no. 3 (1996): 47–70.Google Scholar
See Hoffmaster, , supra note 4, at 1421.Google Scholar
Elliott, C., A Philosophical Disease: Bioethics, Culture and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999): at xxiv.Google Scholar
Mol, A., The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tylor, E. B., Primitive Culture (New York: Harper, 1958 [1871]): at 1.Google Scholar
This definition does not differ greatly from the definition offered on Cultural Competency website of the Medical University of South Carolina, which reads, “Culture consists of a body of learned beliefs, traditions, and guides for behaving and interpreting behavior that are shared among members of a particular group,” at <http://etl2.library.musc.edu/cultural/competency/competency_1.php> (last visited December 7, 2005).+(last+visited+December+7,+2005).>Google Scholar
Malinowski, B., Argonauts of the Western Pacific (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1961 [1922]): at 25.Google Scholar
See Devereux, G., “A Typological Study of Abortion in 350 Primitive, Ancient and Pre-Industrial Societies,” in Rosen, Harold, ed., Therapeutic Abortion (New York: The Julian Press Inc., 1954); Rosenblatt, P. C. Walsh, R. P., and Jackson, D. A., Grief and Mourning in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files Press, 1976).Google Scholar
Kaufman, S. R., “Dying and Death,” in Ember, C. R. and Ember, M., eds., Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology (New York: Kluwer Academic, 2003): at 245.Google Scholar
Koenig, B. and Marshall, P., “Death: Cultural Perspectives,” in Post, S. G., ed., Encyclopedia of Bioethics (New York: Macmillan Reference, 3rd edition, 2004): 546–560.Google Scholar
Van Hollen, C. C., Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): at 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farmer, P., Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Lock, M. M., Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Franklin, S. and Lock, M., eds., Remaking Life & Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Conklin, B. A., Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Warren, M., “The Moral Significance of Birth,” in Bowie, G. L. Higgins, K. M., and Michaels, M. W., eds., Thirteen Questions in Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2nd edition (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1998): 164–171, at 171.Google Scholar
Conklin, B. A. and Morgan, L. M., “Babies, Bodies, and the Production of Personhood in North America and a Native Amazonian Society,” Ethos 24 (1996): 657–694.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cahill, L. S., “Abortion,” in Post, S. G., ed., Encyclopedia of Bioethics (New York: Macmillan, 2004): at 11.Google Scholar
Morgan, L. M., “Ambiguities Lost: Fashioning the Fetus into a Child in Ecuador and the United States,” in Scheper-Hughes, N. and Sargent, C., eds., Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 58–74.Google Scholar
Cultural Competency, Medical University of South Carolina, at <http://etl2.library.musc.edu/cultural/religious/index.php> (last visited December 7, 2005).+(last+visited+December+7,+2005).>Google Scholar
See Lock, , supra note 16.Google Scholar
See Kleinman, , supra note 4, at 58.Google Scholar
Ferguson, J., The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development,’ Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Paltrow, L., “Abortion Issue Divides, Distracts us from Common Threats and Threads,” Perspectives (American Bar Association) 13 (2005): 1–2.Google Scholar
Casper, M. and Morgan, L. M., “Fetus Shouldn't Rob Woman of Personhood,” Springfield [MA] Sunday Republican, May 2, 2004, at C5.Google Scholar
Hennessy, J. and Cliath, A. G., “You've Come A Long Way Baby: Citizens at Conception? Prenatal Personhood and SCHIP Eligibility,” American Behavioral Scientist 47 (2004):1428–1447.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, M. and Karp, I., “Introduction,” in Jackson, M. and Karp, I., eds., Personhood and Agency: The Experience of Self and Other in African Cultures (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991): at 28.Google Scholar
Hartouni, V., “Reflections on Abortion Politics and the Practices Called Person,” in Morgan, L. M. and Michaels, M. W., eds., Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999): at 300.Google Scholar
Hartouni, V., Cultural Conceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the Remaking of Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): at 19.Google Scholar
See Conklin, and Morgan, , supra note 19.Google Scholar
Smith, B. and Brogaard, B., “Sixteen Days,” Journal of Medical Philosophy 28 (2004): 45–78, abstract.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ibid., at 658.Google Scholar
Thompson, J. J., “A Defense of Abortion,” in Bowie, G. L. Higgins, K. M., and Michaels, M. W., eds., Thirteen Questions in Ethics and Social Philosophy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998).Google Scholar