The theory of the human body is always a part of a worldpicture. . . . The theory of the human body is always a part of a fantasy. [JAMES T h e M y t h of Analysis]' HILLMAN,As an anthropologist, I am intrigued by the possibility that culture shapes how biological scientists describe what they discover about the natural world. If this were so, we would be learning about more than the natural world in high school biology class; we would be learning about cultural beliefs and practices as if they were part of nature. In the course of my research I realized that the picture of egg and sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female. The stereotypes imply not only that Portions of this article were presented as the 1987 Becker Lecture, Cornell University. I am grateful for the many suggestions and ideas I received on this occasion. For especially pertinent help with my arguments and data I thank Richard

In this article I describe the main imagery currently used in popular and scientific descriptions of the immune system in the United States: the body as nation state at war over its external borders, containing internal surveillance systems to monitor foreign intruders. Although in some respects this is a boundary‐oriented, internally flat system, in other respects it contains suppressed hierarchies that draw on cultural concepts of race and gender. I suggest what kinds of ideological work such imagery may be doing and what uses people make of it. Other models of the body and immune responses that build on different imagery are described.

This essay explores how the distinctively anthropological concept of culture provides uniquely valuable insights into the workings of science in its cultural context. Recent efforts by anthropologists to dislodge the traditional notion of culture as a homogenous, stable whole have opened up a variety of ways of imagining culture that place power differentials, flux, and contradiction at its center. Including attention to a wide variety of social domains outside the laboratory, attending to the ways nonscientists actively engage with scientific knowledge, and focusing on the complex interactions that flow both into and out of research laboratories are ways the activities of both scientists and nonscientists can be situated in the heterogeneous matrtx of culture. Three images—the citadel, the rhizome, and the string figure—allow us to picture the discontinuous ways science both permeates and is permeated by cultural life.

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