Lively Capital

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, also published by Duke University Press.

“Lively Capital is a terrific collection of essays, an important endeavor which will garner serious attention not only in anthropology and science technology studies but across the human sciences. It will be as widely read as any anthology I can imagine, because of the sharpness of its essays and the diversity of its approaches to the challenges of rethinking the relations of life, capital, and value more generally.”-Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things "Lively Capital is a terrific collection of essays, an important endeavor which will garner serious attention not only in anthropology and science and technology studies but across the human sciences. It will be as widely read as any anthology I can imagine, because of the sharpness of its essays and the diversity of its approaches to the challenges of rethinking the relations of life, capital, and value more generally."-Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things "The air we breathe, the dogs with whom we cohabit, the children we breed, and the pharmaceuticals we regulate co-evolve simultaneously with the differential capitalization of life forms, life sciences, and life circumstances. Convincing us that 'lively capital' is, indeed, a living social form, these essays provide a stunningly provocative read!"-Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America “In many ways, Lively Capital reflects both the challenges and the benefits of adopting an interdisciplinary approach to researching an issue. As a result, the book provides a thought-provoking read for those with an interest in the processes of commodification and in the politics of emerging bioeconomies.” - Brett Edwards (BioScience) “Lively Capital is a challenging, fiercely analytical, and ambitious collection of thirteen essays, tied together by an excellent introduction and epilogue by the editor, Kaushik Sunder Rajan. . . . It is rare to find an edited volume that covers so many diverse and seemingly disparate topics and yet demonstrates such symmetry between its individual contributions.”  - Todd Myers (Bulletin of the History of Medicine)

• Acknowledgments viiIntroduction: The Capitalization of Life and the Liveliness of Capital / Kaushik Sunder Rajan 1Part I. Encountering Value 1. Prescription Maximization and the Accumulation of Surplus Health in the Pharmaceutical Industry: The_BioMarx_Experiment / Joseph Dumit 452. Value-Added Dogs and Lively Capital / Donna J. Haraway 933. Air's Substantiations / Timothy Choy 121Part II. Property and Dispossession 4. Taking Life: Private Rights in Public Nature / Sheila Jasanoff 1555. Rice Genomes: Making Hybrid Properties / Elta Smith 1846. Marx in New Zealand / Travis Tanner 2117. AIDS Policies for Markets and Warriors: Dispossession, Capital, and Pharmaceuticals in Nigeria / Kristin Peterson 228Part III. Global Knowledge Formations 8. Diagnostic Liquidity: Mental Illness and the Global Trade in DNA / Andrew Lakoff 2519. Transforming States in the Era of Global Pharmaceuticals: Visioning Clinical Research in Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore / Wen-Hau Kuo 27910. Biopolitics and the Informating of Environmentalism / Kim Fortun 306Part IV. Promissory Experiments and Emergent Forms of Life 11. Genomics Scandals and Other Volatilities of Promising / Mike Fortun 32912. Desperate and Rational: Of Love, Biomedicine, and Experimental Community / Chloe Silverman 35413. Lively Biotech and Translational Research / Michael M. J. Fischer 385Epilogue: Threads and Articulations / Kaushik Sunder Rajan 437Bibliography 453About the Contributors 491Index 495