The Western, legal idea of the body as sacred arose from the English nineteenth century anatomy acts, which secured the body of the dead person against anatomical experimentation. Much of medical practice itself was originally considered sacrilegious: the opening up of the body, the touching of women, the touching of ‘private’ parts of the body and many of the original medical instruments and techniques, such tasting a patient’s urine, reflect these earlier concerns. With the development of organ transplantation and the commodification of both ‘natural’ and ‘manufactured’ body parts, the idea of the body as sacred is weakening, yet the concept of the sacred is still central to Western medical practice.

Western medicine presents itself as a value free and objective natural science. Yet it is a cultural achievement, incorporating central social values. Biomedicine is a cosmological system, historically replacing religion by claiming to provide answers to the relationship of human beings to their bodies, their experience of pain and suffering, and the answer to the question ‘what is the good life?’ However as Ludwik Fleck argued in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, in 1935, biomedicine is the product of the social, political and cultural values which support it, and which in turn it supports. A key feature of biomedicine is that it will embody profound religious values. As Fleck put it ‘the devil haunts the scientific specialty to its very depths’ (p117). This central insight has informed social theoretic understandings of the social role of medical knowledge, especially in the works of feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex) anthropologists such as Mary Douglas (Natural Symbols); historians of the body such as Thomas Lacqueur (The Making of Sex: From the Greeks to Freud) and those influenced by Michel Foucault, such as Judith Butler (Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex). The claim by Western medicine to present an unmediated knowledge of nature has thus been significantly challenged.

Mary Douglas has pointed out that in many societies, the concept of contamination is central to understanding the concept of health and purity, and that famines, plagues and illness may be considered to be caused by ‘sin’. Similarly, definitions of a bodily state as a disease in biomedicine are often as much a product of moral concerns as they are of scientific ones. In fact, biomedicine can be seen to be a set of moral claims about the good life and the healthy body, delivered in the language an objective and value free science. This especially the case with the new public health which is based on moral judgments about good citizens: those who maintain their body weight within a normal level; conduct their lifestyles in appropriate ways by keeping fit, reducing their drinking and stopping smoking. This targeting of individuals as immoral when they get sick from obesity, alcohol use, or smoking blames the victim and provides a dense smokescreen around those social, political and economic facts that produce and distribute disease, and which shape and limit individual’s lifestyle choices.

This conference will explore the history of the idea that the body is sacred in Western medicine, as well as how this idea is played out around questions of life and death in debates about euthanasia and abortion. Ritual and religious modifications to, and limitations of what may be done to, the body may raise cross-cultural issues of great complexity within medicine. These issues will be explored as problems as case studies arising in hospital and medical settings. The conference will explore the ways in which medicine organizes the moral and the immoral, the sacred and the profane; how it mediates cultural concepts of the sacred – of the body, of blood, and of life and death; and it will examine the consequences for negotiating the sacred cross-culturally when different medical cosmologies come into conflict. In addition to euthanasia, abortion, and organ transplants, the conference will seek to address on the human genome project, cloning, sex selection, fetal tissue for stem cell research, xenotransplantation (transplanting a foreign tissue into another species), cyborgism (the use of technology to replace, restore, or simulate some form of lost physical capability), organ trafficking and theft, hermaphrodites and intersexing (a third category of gender), surrogacy, technological death and brain death, and so on.

The conference will draw together religious representatives, medical practitioners, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, bioethicists, historians of medicine and other members of academic disciplines to address these issues.

Professor Bryan Turner, Research Team Leader at the National University of Singapore’s Religion cluster has agreed to be a key note speaker. Professor Turner is an internationally recognized specialist, working at the interface of the sociology of medicine and the sociology of religion, and the author of over 30 books including The Body and Society and Religion and Social Theory.

Background

The conference will be the third in a series entitled ‘Negotiating the Sacred’. The first, held in November 2004 examined ‘Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society’; the second, to be held in November 2005 will examine ‘Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts’. It is hoped that future conferences will be organised around the themes of ‘education’ and the ‘family’. The aim of this series is to make a sustained contribution to academic and public debate about the role of the sacred in contemporary social life. This might be seen as particularly important where religious difference is central to much national and international discord. It is hoped that the papers delivered during the series will reach an audience well beyond academia through the electronic publication of a series of volumes that will form a ‘landmark’ publication bringing different disciplinary, social, cultural and religious perspectives together. The first of these volumes, based on the 2004 conference, is in an advanced state of preparation and will be published by ANU E-press.

Extra Information
University map
Australian National University homepage
Accommodation

Contact us
Suzanne Groves, Reception
Centre for Cross Cultural Research
Australian National University
Liversidge Street, Acton
T: (02) 6125 2434
F: (02) 6248 0054
E: ccr.admin@anu.edu.au

Conveners
Dr Elizabeth Burns Coleman
Department of Philosophy
La Trobe University
T : (03) 9479 1093

Dr Maria-Suzette Fernandes Dias
Centre for Cross Cultural Research
The Australian National University
T: (02) 6125 9879
E: maria-suzette.fernandesdias@anu.edu.au

Dr Kevin White
School of Social Sciences
The Australian National University
T: (02) 6125 4561
E: kevin.white@anu.edu.au