Forum for Culture

Talk on Medical Ethics, Bio Ethics and Asian Bioethics

By ci ⋅ November 16, 2008 ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

Forum for Culture presented a talk on Medical Ethics, Bio Ethics and Asian Bioethics: Reflections on Culture and Rhetoric in the Response to New Biotechnologies in Contemporary Sri Lanka by Bob Simpson, Department of Anthropology, University of Durham.

The assemblage of knowledge and practices that has come to be known as bioethics is increasingly visible as part and parcel of biomedical technology and research. This assemblage is not only manifest in north America and Europe but is also becoming part of a discourse that surrounds biomedical advances as they impinge on the global south.

The presentation focused on the way in which responses to these advances are being shaped and articulated in local contexts; in particular, it drew on research carried out into the reception of new reproductive and genetic technologies in Sri Lanka which began in 2000. The presentation focused on the construction of an ‘Asian Bioethics’ as part of the local response to new and challenging technologies; it placed in context the rhetorical nature of this response and its links to colonialism, nationalism, and other broader questions of accommodating cultural relativism within global and universalistic statements of virtue.