Biology Unmoored Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology

"Bamford dares to venture into new terrains. In considering the way in which the social and natural sciences co-figure one another, she lays firm ground for investigating some of the implications of the way Euro-Americans model the world through their biological understandings of life. Biology Unmoored is a huge leap forward."—Marilyn Strathern, author of Kinship, Law, and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise"A startling and riveting work. Bamford’s analysis raises our awareness of the implicit assumptions about biological relatedness that have underpinned much of the theory in the social sciences: in kinship studies, in studies of human-environmental relations, and in natural science assumptions about the boundaries between species."—Shirley Lindenbaum, coeditor of Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life