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The Politics of Aid to Burma: A Humanitarian Struggle on the Thai-Burmese Border

The Politics of Aid to Burma: A Humanitarian Struggle on the Thai-Burmese Border The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 95 Fungible Life is an important addition to the growing literature in area-specific science studies, and an important intervention in the anthropology of science scholar- ship on racialised science. By mounting an emic defence of the use of ethnicity in Asian genomic science, Ong suggests that anthropologists need to step back from knee-jerk critiques of racial biology. However, Ong’s positionality as a Malaysian- born ethnic Chinese academic living in America raises the question of whether she gives a bit of a pass to the reliance on ethnicity due to her own emotional commitment to the subject—a potential conflict of interest that she openly acknowledges. Having watched at close range a number of family members battling the very ‘Asian’ cancers that the Singaporean scientists are targeting, Ong presents in her text a kind of personalised optimism that mirrors the personalised medicine her informants seek to create. At times she seems to valorise their scientific quests in ways that perhaps represent some wishful thinking. Ong’s text also suffers from repetitiveness, and could have been slimmed down to make the same points more efficiently and effectively. This, I suspect, reflects more the reluctance of her editor http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology Taylor & Francis

The Politics of Aid to Burma: A Humanitarian Struggle on the Thai-Burmese Border

Watanabe, Chika
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology , Volume 19 (1): 3 – Jan 1, 2018
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The Politics of Aid to Burma: A Humanitarian Struggle on the Thai-Burmese Border

Abstract

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 95 Fungible Life is an important addition to the growing literature in area-specific science studies, and an important intervention in the anthropology of science scholar- ship on racialised science. By mounting an emic defence of the use of ethnicity in Asian genomic science, Ong suggests that anthropologists need to step back from knee-jerk critiques of racial biology. However, Ong’s positionality as a Malaysian- born ethnic Chinese...
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Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2017, Chika Watanabe
ISSN
1740-9314
eISSN
1444-2213
DOI
10.1080/14442213.2017.1394624
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 95 Fungible Life is an important addition to the growing literature in area-specific science studies, and an important intervention in the anthropology of science scholar- ship on racialised science. By mounting an emic defence of the use of ethnicity in Asian genomic science, Ong suggests that anthropologists need to step back from knee-jerk critiques of racial biology. However, Ong’s positionality as a Malaysian- born ethnic Chinese academic living in America raises the question of whether she gives a bit of a pass to the reliance on ethnicity due to her own emotional commitment to the subject—a potential conflict of interest that she openly acknowledges. Having watched at close range a number of family members battling the very ‘Asian’ cancers that the Singaporean scientists are targeting, Ong presents in her text a kind of personalised optimism that mirrors the personalised medicine her informants seek to create. At times she seems to valorise their scientific quests in ways that perhaps represent some wishful thinking. Ong’s text also suffers from repetitiveness, and could have been slimmed down to make the same points more efficiently and effectively. This, I suspect, reflects more the reluctance of her editor

Journal

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology – Taylor & Francis

Published: Jan 1, 2018

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