"In my mind, this language crashed into contemporary descriptions of the economy of the late 20th century (mentioned in part 2), with a focus on flexible specialization, flexible production, and flexible, rapid response to an ever-changing market with specific, tailor-made products. Was I watching as the images developing in scientist's minds incorporated, within the body, models of a system and how its parts interact that is being given great salience by forces in the society at large? Or was I watching as scientists your life to biological model that went out from science into the society and in turn enlivened our general concepts of what it takes to make a robust organisation? Or were these models arising completely independently of each other?"
The couple of questions the author tries to answer in this book defines her main arguments. The first one is how we perceived the body and what is the 'taken-for- grantedness' in it? The second question is how this perception and 'taken-for-grantedness' about body and immunity is different around 20 to 30 years ago from the present? The third one is regarding the relationship between this ' change in perception of body and the dramatic changes happened in all aspects of life in united states including health care, education and neoliberal policies in political economy.
from her wide ethnographic study specifically focused on health, body and immunity tries to understand this correlation and argues that different time and space along with its socio-cultural imagination defines the 'taken-for grantednes' of body and immunity. The idea of lab space as an ideal condition to understand the body is negated by the author. for example, the author argues that the social conditioning towards national security and defence in the 1970's and1980's in the middle of cold war played a significant role in reimagining the immunity system as military set up and body as a nation state. the end of her argument is today ' human body is again reimagined as a flexible system like that of global flexible and specialized economy, where flexibility is considered as desirable feature liked in every aspect of life.
