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5th
EMBL/EMBO Joint Conference 2004 |
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Session IV |
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A futurology of science and religion Immortality reimagined |
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Debbora
Battaglia, Professor of Anthropology, Mount Holyoke
College, Massachusetts, USA
How do alternative
science religious communities imagine human life
after apocalypse? What can we learn from their sometimes
dangerous, sometimes enlightening visions? And how
does mainstream science and bioethical debate figure
in the futurology of such religions? Focusing on
the Raelian Movement and its neo-Creationist faith
in human reproductive cloning, this paper opens
a window onto the discursive universe and social
consequences of taking Science as God. Specifically,
it calls for critical engagement of technoscience
spirituality – defined as the effect of 'hard
faith' in social networking potential of new reproductive
technologies – for examining an 'ethics of
self' in modernity. It also calls for recognition
of the media as integral to technoscientific imaginaries,
and considers how mediatization shapes, and is shaped
by, public culture. In this light, social personhood
appears as a project of situated creativity, and
of hoping against hope in an age of insecurity.
Finally, the paper argues that the ethnography of
technoscience 'faith-sites,' taken as a valuable
supplement to existing disciplinary knowledge of
the faith-science relationship might, on the one
hand, productively destabilize prior knowledge,
and on the other hand, offer a model of and for
more densely articulated interdisciplinary engagement.
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