The contributors examine how and why low temperatures have been harnessed to defer individual death through freezing whole human bodies to defer nonhuman species death by freezing tissue from endangered animals to defer racial death by preserving biospecimens from indigenous people and to defer large-scale human death through pandemic preparedness. In Cryopolitics, experts from anthropology, history of science, environmental humanities, and indigenous studies make clear the political and cultural consequences of extending life and deferring death by technoscientific means. Cryopreservation has contributed to the transformation of markets, regimes of governance and ethics, and the very relationship between life and death. In many cases, these practices of freezing life are an attempt to cheat death. Technologies of cryopreservation support global food chains, seed and blood banks, reproductive medicine, and even the preservation of cores of glacial ice used to study climate change. At the same time, energy-intensive cooling technologies are widely used as a means of preservation. As the planet warms and the polar ice caps melt, naturally occurring cold is a resource of growing scarcity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |