Ethnographic critique and technoscientific narratives: the old mole, ethical plateaux, and the governance of emergent biosocial polities.

A reading of the puzzle novel Vienna Blood, by Adrian Mathews, is juxtaposed to three ethnographic sketches of contemporary ethical plateaus or domains of ethical challenge--the challenges of informed public consent to new technologies, the seductions to do whatever is medically possible (sometimes at the expense of quality of life or the good death'). and the power of money in driving the biotechnological industries. Vienna Blood deals with precautionary germplasm modification and chemical camouflage justified as protection against ethnically-targeted biological warfare, and touches on a series of technologies such as new reproductive technologies, genetic engineering, and cryptographic attacks and defenses, as well as the ability to evade regulatory controls. Such technoscientifically informed novels are useful as cautionary tales, in exploring the complexity and interaction among new technologies, and the phantasmagoria that help drive new technologies. They are not so good at thinking through institutional development: a challenge for ethnography and new social theory. Ethnography, like novels, can function as checks on the mechanisms of abstraction and universalization that frequently bedevil the non-anthropological, non-cross-culturally or cross-temporally comparative, social sciences. Questions are raised about new or emergent biosocialities, forms of governance, and forms of cultural critique.