Anti-bodies: the production of dissent

Abstract

Attitudes vis-à-vis vaccines take on today a variety of forms in Euro-American societies. Drawing on an ethnographic research in several French and Portuguese settings, we examine the meaning and the experiential basis of some contemporary forms of vaccine acceptability as they emerge in routine vaccination. Against the backdrop of forms circumscribed to particular cultural scenes or bounded systems of ideas, we focus more specifically on a cross-cut diffuse tendency which resonates with wider contemporary transformations. Its analysis cannot however be framed within the narrow limits of health and risk management. Health and the body are but one of the realms in which a same pattern arises. It is by exploring the political dimensions of such pattern that the cultural production of consent and that of dissent with respect to vaccine acceptability stand in relation to one another as two sides of the same coin.