The Social Meaning and Relations of Cloning

David, M.

Abstract

Claude Lévi-Strauss's Myth and Meaning discusses the cultural significance attached to twins in nonliterate societies. Twins are invested with ambivalent feelings, embodying abundance and loss, security and threat, natural and unnatural, good and evil. Twins also challenge the “identity” of being one thing or the other. The spliced-lipped, incipient twin, hare, as messenger/transgressor between binary opposites, is also the mythical carrier of order and mishap. Being born feet first, wanting to move too fast, to get ahead of oneself or one's twin at the expense of mother and nature, is also invested with moral significance. Mythic thinking is about projecting the desire for social order onto nature. Yesterday's twins are today's clones. Advocates of cloning, and in particular human cloning, are united in the claim that their critics engage in scientifically illiterate mythic thinking, but, as Lévi-Strauss concluded, belief in the inevitability and moral superiority of change, progress, and history also represents a form of “mythic thinking” in modern “scientific” cultures. This entry highlights the mythic constructions of all sides of the cloning debate. It suggests the socially based nature of beliefs in general.

Citation

David, M. (2020). The Social Meaning and Relations of Cloning. In G. Ritzer, & C. Rojek (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology. (2nd). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosc056.pub2

• Online Publication Date: Oct 22, 2020
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2020
• Deposit Date: Mar 16, 2020
• Publisher: Wiley
• Edition: 2nd
• Book Title: The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology.
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosc056.pub2
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1628841
• Contract Date: Dec 16, 2019