To look more carefully at these themes, a series of workshops was launched in conjunction with the Royal Anthropological Institute, the first two of which, on "Genomics" (April 2005) and "Social Bodies" (September 2005), have expressed the approach to be taken here. Maryon McDonald then convened another conference on "Anatomy in context" was held in Cambridge in September 2007, setting out some of her first year’s findings and bringing together anthropologists, anatomists and historians of science. The project starts from the anthropological understanding that "bodies" are inherently social or relational - just as the sciences that helped to construct an apparently singular "human body" have themselves been accorded an inherent sociality. At the same time, the bio-sciences that once kept the "social" at bay appear to have been called to account and the space of the social has been re-constructed as bioethics and ethics. With developments such as bio-banks, transplants, stem cell medicine and genomics, for example, the initial idea for this project was to investigate new experiential realities of bodies and the emergent forms of the social, in the practical imaginations of governance and accountability, that accompany them. It is the realities of all this, in new bodies as working objects and the embodied knowledge they effect, that remain of central interest here.

For this project,  2007 and 2008 have been largely devoted to fieldwork. Maryon McDonald’s Social Anthropology project has involved carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in two different contexts: the teaching and learning of anatomy in a dissection room, and then a study of the professional practices of organ transplantation. It is this second aspect of the work that has occupied the entirety of 2008. The study of the teaching of anatomy meant looking at the bodies that students learn about and acquire during part of their medical education, and the study of organ transplantation involves a closer examination of such bodies and their congruence or disjunction with each other and with the bodies of the medical practitioners themselves. At the same time, whilst all these bodies could be said to be necessarily social, the shape of the social in self-consciously "ethical" practice has become very much a part of the project.