Week 4: The body is in the eye of the doctor
ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs—Technology and society (Semester 2,
2025)
August 29, 2025
Main reading: Mol (2003b); Mol (2003a)
Other reading: Law and Mol (1995); Mol (2008)
Notes
Annemarie Mol continues the tradition of ethnographic following by following doctors, patients, and disease in a hospital. Her work with John Law brings together some of the main ideas from the last few weeks into a framework for the study of networks that crosscut material, social, and symbolic dimensions.
Keywords
ontology, material semiotics
Learning outcomes
- Understand the idea of material semiotics and its implications for ontological assumptions about nature and society.
- Be able to explain the connections between an analysis of material semiotics and actor-networks.
References
Law, John, and Annemarie Mol. 1995. “Notes on Materiality and
Sociality.” The Sociological Review 43 (2): 274–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1995.tb00604.x.
Mol, Annemarie. 2003a. “Different Atheroscleroses.” In
The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, 29–51. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822384151.
———. 2003b. “Doing Disease.” In The Body Multiple:
Ontology in Medical Practice, 1–27. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822384151.
———. 2008. “I Eat an Apple. On Theorizing Subjectivities.”
Subjectivity 22 (1): 28–37. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.2.