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This article examines how people in the Netherlands attempted to come to terms with the phenomenon of a genetically modified bull, illuminating the levels of enculturation surrounding the production, consumption, and use of new genetic knowledge. The article demonstrates that new genetic knowledge and practices are deeply entangled with Dutch national identity, the social ideal of tolerance, and anxieties about what Dutch identity is and means in relation both to the history of Nazi occupation and to contemporary immigration. In so doing I explore how this new knowledge and practice raise issues regarding purity and the porous border crossings and policings of contemporary biotechnoscience. The article also illustrates that there is no single story of genetics in the Netherlands but that people continually contest its meanings, significance, and appropriate use.

We introduce this special issue of Medial Anthropology Quarterly on public health genomics by exploring both the unique contribution of ethnographic sensibility that medical anthropologists bring to the study of genomics and some of the key insights offered by the essays in this collection. As anthropologists, we are concerned with the power dynamics and larger cultural commitments embedded in practices associated with public health. We seek to understand, first, the broad significance of genomics as a cultural object and, second, the social action set into motion as researchers seek to translate genomic knowledge and technology into public health benefits.

Emergent conditions of life at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century create new opportunities and challenges for medical anthropology. The articles included in this special issue of Medical Anthropology suggest four areas that call out for more attention: the changing scientific and philosophical status of the human, including definitions of life and biology more broadly; the material consequences of anticipatory fictions; the expanding and intensifying forces invested in the production of bodies; and the emergent and historical conditions shaping expectations and experiences of bodies as they are managed and lived. In elaborating the significance of these issues, we provide an introduction to the articles included in this special issue and point to how the contributions to this collection offer models for approaching emergent forms of life.

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