Biosocial Worlds. Группа авторов
Lock is Professor Emerita in the Departments of Anthropology and Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University. Her research focuses on embodiment, epistemologies of medical knowledge, and the global impact of biomedical technologies. She is the author and/or co-editor of 18 books and over 220 articles. Lock is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Officier de L’Ordre national du Québec, Officer of the Order of Canada, and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Lotte Meinert is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University. She is the author of Hopes in Friction: Schooling, health, and everyday life in Uganda (Information Age Publishing, 2009), and the co-editor of In the Event: Toward an anthropology of generic moments (Berghahn, 2015), Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality: Time objectified (Temple University Press, 2014), and Time Work: Studies of temporal agency (Berghahn, 2020). Meinert’s current research focuses on marriage, ageing, morality, trauma and time.
David Napier is Professor of Medical Anthropology at University College London and Director of its Science, Medicine and Society Network. He is a founding partner of Cities Changing Diabetes and its Global Academic Lead. Napier has co-authored three UCL–Lancet Commissions, leading the 2014 Lancet Commission on Culture and Health. For his activities with more than 100 charities, he was awarded the first Beacon Fellowship in Public Engagement. He is also the recipient of the Burma Coalition’s Human Rights Award.
Jörg Niewöhner is currently a Professor of Social Anthropology and Human–Environment Relations at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he also serves as the Director of the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human–Environment Systems (IRI THESys). Over the last 20 years, his ethnographic research has addressed the entanglement of social and ecological thought and practice in health and medicine, and global environmental change and sustainability with a particular focus on questions of knowledge and infrastructure.
Adriana Petryna is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work probes expert knowledge and collective survival in crisis contexts, including in the aftermath of nuclear disaster and global health. Her book-in-progress, What is a Horizon? Abrupt climate change and human futures, examines abrupt environmental shifts and challenges of emergency response, particularly to wildfires. She was a Faculty Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values and is a recent Guggenheim Fellow.
Jens Seeberg is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University. His research explores the biosocial dynamics of the development, spread and treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) in India, and antimicrobial resistance more broadly. He is currently leading an exploration of biotic socialities in a project on ‘people, pigs and bacteria’ in a rural community in Denmark. He has published on TB, inequity in health, private healthcare and medical systems in India. At present, he is writing a monograph entitled Resistances of Tuberculosis, on the biosocial dynamics of patients, TB bacteria and health providers in India.
Mette N. Svendsen is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen. Her research explores ethical and existential dimensions of medical science and technology. She takes a particular interest in how life is perceived and administered in the interface between the laboratory, the clinic, and the public.
Anna Tsing is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is co-curator of Feral Atlas: The more-than-human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, to appear in 2020 at https://www.feralatlas.org). She has written and co-edited several books, including Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (University of Minnesota Press) and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins (Princeton University Press).
Susan Reynolds Whyte is Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. She carries out research in East Africa on social efforts to secure wellbeing in the face of poverty, disease, conflict, and rapid change. She uses concepts of pragmatism, uncertainty, and temporality to examine relationships between people, institutions, ideas, and things. Her publications deal with the management of misfortune, changing healthcare systems, disability and culture, social lives of medicines, legacies of violence, and the response to HIV and other chronic conditions.
Allan Young is a social anthropologist and Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Arts at McGill University. He has conducted ethnographic research in Ethiopia, Nepal, and the US Veterans Administration. His fieldwork and publications concentrate on indigenous styles of reasoning and technologies. Since the 1990s, his substantive interests have focused on the social history of the diagnosis and management of post-traumatic syndromes, notably war-related post-traumatic stress disorder.
Jens Seeberg, Andreas Roepstorff and Lotte Meinert
Anthropological explorations of the worlds we live in have systematically destabilised the boundary between nature and culture that once served as a founding dichotomy of anthropology as a discipline. Not only has the idea of nature as a domain that can exist outside the reach of the impact of (human) culture been challenged by the massive impact of humanity on the global ecosystem, as reflected in the labelling of our current geological epoch as the Anthropocene, it has also become increasingly clear that the ability to produce culture is not an exclusively human capacity. Indeed, the anthropological concept of culture can no longer ignore ‘cultivation practices in non-human cultures, such as ants, that go back hundreds of millions of years’ (Lien et al. 2018, 16). Furthermore, as Palsson has pointed out, life itself has become unstable in a range of ways (Palsson 2016). Body parts and organs are augmented or replaced with implants. Organs travel from one body to the next and from one species to another. The renewed importance of the field of epigenetics, as well as the unfolding exploration of the human microbiome, increasingly unsettles old constructs of the individual, highlighting permeability and relationality between organisms and between organism and environment. These and related developments in our understanding and production of life have led to a suggestion to replace the notion of ‘human being’ with one of ‘human becoming’ (Ingold 2013).
Such changes and insights call for a repositioning of anthropology vis-à-vis biology, as they seem to open new possibilities for both disciplines. Biodeterminism – the assumption that life is genetically predetermined or inscribed – no longer upholds the status of dominant scientific paradigm among biologists. Keller, for example, has pointed to the long history of the nature–nurture debate and its refusal to die (Keller 2010). Yet the debate thrives from the continuous production of new data in one camp that ought to convince members of the other camp, and she argues that semantic difficulties have contributed significantly to driving the disagreement. Importantly, Keller points to the mirage of a space between nature and nurture and, tracing the expression back to Galton, asserts that attempting to replace genetic determinism on the one hand with a similarly reductionist opposite of social determinism on the other would lead nowhere (Keller 2010). However, as noted by Lewontin and many others, some very real effects emerged from this ‘mirage of a space’: the separation of the natural and the social had opened the space in which deterministic ‘projections’ could be cast in both directions between the two, each constituting a Platonic screen for the other (Lewontin 1993). Latour pointed out this model in his critique of the social sciences, highlighting the projection of the social onto the natural (Latour 1993), but, we argue, the reverse projection is equally problematic.
Thus, this volume brings together state-of-the-art contributions to critical anthropological thought around the social and biological as well as ethnographic explorations of human and non-human life in the light of changing understandings of biology.
Projection
We shall use two short stories by