No abstract

No abstract

Anthropologists often criticize the discipline of bioethics because its remote, abstract theories fail to capture how front-line clinicians experience and resolve moral uncertainty. The critique overlooks, however, the ways that everyday, emergent moral discourse is influenced--over time and through several mediations--by formal ethical notions. High-order ethical pronouncements become sedimented into the conditions of work, illustrated in this article by a two-year ethnographic study of Assertive Community Treatment (ACT), a popular mode of outpatient psychiatric services. ACT clinicians' moral unease when they break the confidentiality of patients is connected to high-order debates, dating back 35 years, about ensuring patients' autonomy without abandoning them. These debates originally spurred the invention of ACT, and they get braided into today's moral discourse through several mediations: regulatory paperwork, the mandates and micropolitics of staff-patient interactions, and the idealized self-image of front-line staff. This article shows how everyday moral talk is coproduced by both the immediate contexts of clinical work and the categories of formal bioethics.

I examine the growth of Pentecostalism in the Haitian diaspora through both a neo-Weberian framework and the argument, derived from Walter Benjamin, that the cultural translation of religious doctrine should resonate with the original and not merely substitute scholarly categories for sacred meanings. Haitian migrants to Guadeloupe, French West Indies, appropriate Pentecostalism to produce a transnational enclave in the face of marginatity and displacement. Using Christian idioms, they defend themselves against denigrating stereotypes and articulate sentiments of loss and remembrance of the Haitian homeland. Their theology of sin, salvation, and the spirit therefore overlaps with anthropological frameworks about the production of community. These two languages complement each other, and each provides a partial theory to explain the need for moral separationism as well as its likely effects. Examining this complementary relationship suggests both the specificity of Haitian Pentecostalism and the limits of Benjamin's literary model for ethnographic interpretation. [Pente costalism, Haiti, transnationalism, religion, morality, translation, Benjamin] American Ethnologist30(l):85-lQl.Copyright© 2m).i, American Anthropological Assiui;nion

Recent disputes about human population genetics research have been provoked by the field's political vulnerability (the historic imbalance of power between the geneticists and the people they study) and conceptual vulnerability (the mismatch between scientific and popular understandings of the genetic basis of collective identity). The small, isolated groups often studied by this science are now mobilizing themselves as political subjects, pressing sovereignty claims, and demanding control over the direction and interpretation of research. Negotiations between the geneticists and the people asked to donate DNA have resulted not only in explicit bioethics protocols but also in diffuse anxiety over the incommensurability between expert and non-expert views about genetic evidence for identity claims. This article compares two disputes over genetics research: the Human Genome Diversity Project and the use of genetics to prove identity claims among the Melungeons of Tennessee. The case studies illustrate "bioethics in action": how particular controversies and interests drive the production of bioethics discourses and techniques (such as informed consent protocols). They also illustrate some limits on the usual apparatus of bioethics in overcoming this science's multiple vulnerabilities.