The Age of Immunology
Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World
To illustrate these destructive consequences, Napier likens the current craze for embracing diversity and the use of politically correct speech to a cultural potluck to which we each bring different dishes, but at which no one can eat unless they abide by the same rules. Similarly, loaning money to developing nations serves as a tool both to make the peoples in those nations more like us and to maintain them in the nonthreatening status of distant dependents. To break free of the resulting downward spiral of homogenization and self-focus, Napier suggests that we instead adopt a new defining concept based on embryology, in which development and self-growth take place through a process of incorporation and transformation. In this effort he suggests that we have much to learn from non-Western peoples, such as the Balinese, whose ritual practices require them to take on the considerable risk of injecting into their selves the potential dangers of otherness—and in so doing ultimately strengthen themselves as well as their society.
The Age of Immunology, with its combination of philosophy, history, and cultural inquiry, will be seen as a manifesto for a new age and a new way of thinking about the world and our place in it.
Preface: Nailed to the Crossroads
Part I - Anthropology
1. Anthropological Inoculations
2. Thinking Immunologically
3. Immunology and Illness Experience
Part II - Espistemology
4. Foreign AIDS: Cultural Relations as an Immunological Form
5. Unnatural Selection: Social Symbols of the Microbial World
6. Reciprocity: Solution and Dissolution in Immunology
7. Undiscovered Selves
Part III - Autogeny
Epilogue: Nonself Help