Margaret Lock

Prof. Margaret Lock, Montréal, 2013

Margaret Lock (born 1936) is a distinguished Canadian medical anthropologist, known for her publications in connection with an anthropology of the body and embodiment, comparative epistemologies of medical knowledge and practice, and the global impact of emerging biomedical technologies.^[1]

Life

Lock was born in Bromley, England, immigrated to Canada in 1961, and has dual citizenship. She trained at the University of Leeds as a biochemist, following which she carried out laboratory research at the Banting Institute, Toronto, and then at the University of California, at both the San Francisco and Berkeley campuses. After a trip to Japan, Lock made a career switch and commenced her training in anthropology at Berkeley, culminating in 1976 in a Doctor of Philosophy in cultural anthropology. After completing a postdoctoral position at UCSF, Lock took up an appointment at McGill University where she established an internationally recognized medical anthropology programs^[2] and was joined several years later by the medical anthropologist Allan Young. This program is one of the leading centers of medical anthropology.^[3] Lock has held visiting positions at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris; the University of Vienna, Departments of Anthropology and History of Medicine, and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences. She has been a research associate and a visiting professor at Kyoto University, and has taught at St. Luke's International Hospital, Tokyo.^[1]

She is currently the Marjorie Bronfman Professor Emerita in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University and is also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology.^[1]

Research

Lock is the author or co-editor of 17 books and over 200 scholarly articles. Her first book, East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience (1980), set the stage for over two decades of critically reflective comparative ethnographic research in Japan and North America in connection with disease and illness, life cycle transitions, and the body.^[4][5] This body of work makes clear that all medical knowledge, including that of biomedicine, is embedded in specific historical, social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, with consequences for onto-epistemologies^[6] of medical knowledge and practice.

Her first monograph Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) is concerned with the medicalization of female mid-life in Japan and North America. Lock created the concept of “local biologies” to account for the empirical findings generated by this research.^[7][8] This widely used concept de-centers the modernist assumption of a universal material body, and postulates ceaseless interactions among bodies, environments (evolutionary, historical, local), and social/political variables. Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen in their book An Anthropology of Biomedicine (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) use the term “biosocial differentiation” to refer to the interactions of biological and social processes across time and space that sediment into local biologies.^[9]

Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) documents changes in the criteria for the determination of death made in the 1960s in order that organs could legally be procured for transplant. In Japan, the possibility of organ procurement from brain dead bodies—entities whose life was not recognized as ended—caused major public unrest, with major consequences for the transplantation enterprise.^[10][11] Lock’s most recent ethnography, The Alzheimer Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013) highlights the “molecularized prevention” of Alzheimer's disease in which tracking of somatic biomarkers is central, however, the presence of such biomarkers does not determine a future occurrence of Alzheimer's.^[12] She is working currently on the burgeoning discipline of epigenetics, which confronts the age-old debate of nature versus nurture.^[13][14][15]

Awards and honors

Many of her books have received honors. Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America was awarded six prizes, including the J. I. Staley Prize of the School of American Research, the Canada-Japan Book Prize, and the Wellcome Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death and An Anthropology of Biomedicine have also received awards.^[1]

In 1994, Lock was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in the Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences; in 1997 she was awarded the Prix Léon-Gérin, the Prix du Quebec that goes to a research in the social sciences. In 2002 she received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize. She was made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec in 2004 and in 2005 was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Izaak-Walton-Killam Award, a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship, and was inducted into the Académie des Grands Montréalais, secteur social.^[16] In 2007 she was awarded the Gold Medal for Research by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).^[17] In 2010 Lock was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in 2011 received the McGill Medal for Exceptional Academic Achievement, and was a recipient of a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.^[18]. Lock gave the 8th Eric Wolf Lecture at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna in October 2013^[19]. In 2014 lock was a finalist for the Mavis Gallant Price for non-fiction from the Quebec Writers Association for The Alzheimer Conumdrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging^[20]. In October of 2015 Lock was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[21]. Lock holds an Advisory Board position for the Canadian Institute for Advances Research (CIFAR) research program "Humans and the Microbiome"^[22]. In November 2016 Lock gave the Huxley Lecture for the Royal Anthropological Institute at the British Museum^[23]. Lock was inducted into the Order de Montreal in May 2017^[24].

Selected Publications

Books

• Lock, Margaret and Pálsson, Gísli. Can Science Resolve the Nature/Nurture Debate? Polity Press. 2016
• Lock, Margaret. The Alzheimer Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Lock, Margaret and Nguyen, Vinh-Kim.An Anthropology of Biomedicine. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. ISBN 978-1-405-11071-6. Second edition 2017.
• Lock, Margaret, Paul Atkinson and Peter Glasner Eds. Handbook of Genetics and Society: Mapping the new genomic era. 2009.
• Lock, Margaret and Farquhar, Judith. Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-822-33845-1.
• Franklin, Sarah and Lock, Margaret. Remaking Life and Death: Towards an Anthropology of the Biosciences. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2003. ISBN 978-1-930-61820-6.
• Lock, Margaret. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-520-22814-6.
• Nichter, Mark and Margaret Lock eds. New Horizons in Medical Anthropology: A Festschrift in Honor of Charles Leslie. New York: Routledge. 2002.
• Lock, Margaret, Young, Allen and Cambrosio, Alberto. Living and Working with the New Medical Technologies: Intersections of Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0-521-65568-2.
• Lock, Margaret and Kaufert, Patricia A. Pragmatic Women and Body Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0-521-62929-4.
• Lock, Margaret. Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. ISBN 978-0-520-20162-0.
• Lindenbaum, Shirley and Margaret Lock Eds. Knowledge, Power and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1993.
• Lock, Margaret. East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980

Articles - Brief selection

• 2017 Living Cadavers and the Calculation of Death in Antonius C.G.M. Robben ed. Death, Mourning and Burial: A Croos-Cultural Reader, 2nd Edition. Wiley-Blackwell p 90 – 96.
• 2015 Comprehending Embodiment in the Era of the Epigenome, Current Anthropology 56:151-177.
• 2013 Detecting Amyloid Biomarkers: Embodied Risk and Alzheimer Prevention, BioSocieties 8:107-123.
• 2013 The Lure of the Epigenome, The Lancet 381:1896-1897.
• 2012 The Epigenome and Nature/Nurture Reunification, Medical Anthropology, special issue on Local Biologies, Med Anthropol. 2013, 32:291-308.
• 2011 Embodying Molecular Genomics, In. Frances E. Mascia-Lees ed. A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Pp.223-238.
• 2011 Seduced by Plaques and Tangles: Alzheimer’s Disease and the Cerebral Subject, in F. Ortega and F. Vidal eds., Neurocultures: Glimpses into and Expanding Universe. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Pp.201-216.
• 2010 Dementia Entanglements in a Postgenomic Era, Science Technology Human Values 35: 478-492
• 2010 Postgenomics, uncertain futures, and the familiarization of susceptibility genes. Social Science and Medicine, 172: 1768-1775, with Gillian Chilibeck and Megha Sedev.
• 2009 Demoting the Genetic Body, Anthropologica. 51:159-172.
• 2009 Local Biologies, in David Cayley ed, Ideas on the Nature of Science Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions.
• 2006 Organ Transplantation in a Globalized World,” with Megan Crowley-Matoka, Mortality 11:166-181
• 2005 Eclipse of the Gene and the Return of Divination. Current Anthropology 46: S47-S70.
• 2002 Inventing a New Death and Making it Believable. Anthropology and Medicine, 9:97-115.
• 2002 Human Body Parts as Therapeutic Tools: Contradictory Discourses and Transformed Subjectivities. Qualitative Health Research, 12(10): 1406-1418.
• 2001 Alienation of Body Tissue and the Biopolitics of Immortalized Cell Lines. Body and Society, 7(2-3): 63-91.
• 2001 The Tempering of Medical Anthropology: Troubling Natural Categories. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 15: 478-492.
• 1998 Breast Cancer: Reading the Omens. Anthropology Today 14(4): 7-16.
• 1998 Anomalous Ageing: Managing the Postmenopausal Body. Body and Society, 4(1): 35-61.
• 1997 Making Difference Matter: Decentering the Natural Body. Configurations, 2: 267-292.
• 1996 Displacing Suffering: The Reconstruction of Death in North America and Japan. Deadalus, 125: 207-244.
• 1994 Interrogating the Human Genome Diversity Project. Social Science & Medicine, 39(5): 603-606.
• 1991 Contested Meanings of the Menopause. The Lancet, 337: 1270-1291.
• 1990 Restoring Order to the House of Japan. Wilson Quarterly Autumn, 42-49.
• 1989 Words of Fear, Words of Power: Nerves and the Awakening of Political Consciousness. Medical Anthropology, 11: 79-90.
• 1978 Scars of Experience: The Art of Moxibustion in Japanese Medicine and Society. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 2: 151-175.

Media and Profiles

1. Interview for CBC Television series: “In the Nature of Things” 2017
2. “Monster in the Mind” DVD, Jean Carper Production, film about dementia 2016
3. A Q & A with Margaret Lock. Dialogue: Published by the Social Studies and Humanities Research Council.
4. How to Think about Science: Episode 3 - Margaret Lock. Ideas with Paul Kennedy. CBC. Jan. 2, 2009
5. Hynes, Jim. "Prof. Margaret Lock to be awarded McGill Medal". McGill Reporter. May 23, 2012.
6. McGill's Margaret Lock awarded SSHRC Gold Medal McGill News. Oct. 19, 2007
7. Haldane, Maeve. "Anthropology Meets Medicine Archived 2013-01-12 at the Wayback Machine.." University Affairs Archived 2013-05-11 at the Wayback Machine, Feb. 11, 2008.
8. Interview with O Globo, Rio, “Genetic Testing for Alzheimer’s Disease” Aug. 2006
9. Interview with Radio 4 BBC, “Menopause and Culture.” May, 2006.
10. Interview with The Scotsman, “The Genetics of Alzheimer’s Disease” Feb. 2006.
11. Interview with Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “Changing Attitudes Towards Death” Nov. 2002.
12. Interview with CBC on Sunday Round-up, “Death in Modern Society” May, 2002.
13. Video presentation, “Culture and Menopause”, Illinois Department of Public Health, Chicago, Illinois, Nov. 1999.
14. University of the Air, NHK Tokyo, “Women's Health in the 1990s”, one hour video, 1999
15. Quirks and Quarks, CBC Radio, The Human Genome Diversity Project, 1996.
16. Six interviews with CBC, Canada-Japan Book Prize, 1995.
17. WGBH - Nova program on menopause, April, 1995.
18. Interview with KPFA Radio about Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America, California, 1994.

References