Center for the Study of Europe Hosts Works in Progress Meeting
The Center for the Study of Europe, an affiliated regional center at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, kicked off their Works in Progress series on October 10, 2018 with a discussion featuring Kimberly Arkin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University.
Arkin delivered a talk entitled “Debating Bioethics and Making Secular France,” that explored the way some southern French caregivers discursively constructed what they considered a distinctively French bioethics.
According to Arkin, caregivers built putative French ethical distinctiveness—whether positively or negatively valued—in relation to a caricature of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ individualism and transactionalism that allowed patients with sufficient resources to ‘choose’ medical options in a limitless marketplace. Arkin says they argued against unfettered choice using a secular, folk psychological discourse that made patient demands look un-chosen and medical authority essential to the preservation of full human ‘dignity.’
Arkin said that this consensual approach to medical ethics contradicts much of what anthropologists describe as the ‘secular’ ethos of contemporary Europe. Instead of freedom, individualism, and self-making, caregivers’ accounts of human flourishing were built on limits, medical authority, and patient heteronomy, according to Arkin.
Arkin is a cultural anthropologist broadly interested in the production and contestation of national, religious, racial, and gendered identities in France and Western Europe more generally. Her first book, Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France, explores the racialization of Jewishness among second and third generation North African Jewish adolescents, arguing that it is both a mode of asserting relative Frenchness and a major barrier to feeling “at home” in France.
The Works in Progress presentations are intended to foster interdisciplinary conversations among Europeanists at BU. Open to faculty, graduate students, and visiting researchers. RSVP to edamrien@bu.edu.