Works in Progress: Debating Bioethics and Making Secular France - A Presentation by Kimberly Arkin

This talk explores the way some southern French caregivers discursively constructed what they considered a distinctively French bioethics. 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. 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.’ This surprisingly 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.

Kimberly Arkin is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. She 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.