What does it mean today in Greece to have thalassemia or otherwise known as Mediterranean anemia? What does it mean to be thalassemic in an era where biomedicine has expanded the range of theories and tools available for understanding life and intervening in it?

The past decades have been characterized by significant changes and shifts that mediate the thalassemic experience, concerning therapeutic treatment, the involvement of state agencies, as well as the sociality and collective mobilization of individuals with thalassemia. Within the framework of these transformations, individuals are called upon to give meaning to their often marginal experience and to act accordingly.

This anthropological study, based on field research and focusing on the embodied experience of illness, deals with the reception, appropriation, and re-signification of biomedical information, as well as the construction of thalassemia as stigma, as bodily and biological difference, as hereditary, genetic, and chronic illness, as disability, as biocommunicational normality, and as otherness. It analyzes how knowledge produced in the field of biosciences mediates the demarcation between normal and abnormal, between natural and artificial, as well as the meaning-making of concepts such as human, life, health, citizen. This book contributes to the anthropological discussion on the relationship between biology and culture, as well as to the broader interdisciplinary inquiry concerning both the biosciences and the social and human sciences.