Biosocial Worlds. Группа авторов
in anthropological analysis (Young; Seeberg); or the broader exploration of the effects of tensions between biologically grounded categories and biosocial complexities (Lock; Napier; Meinert and Whyte; Petryna).
Clearly, the degree of proximity matters. The closer the collaboration, the greater the need for scientists to find mutually agreeable entry points for interdisciplinary dialogue and exploration. We suggest that the focus on scale may be a useful entry point, not for a backward-looking re-enactment of disciplinary boundaries within neatly carved ‘scalar’ principles, but as a point of fruitful exploration of such boundaries with the intention of challenging and reshaping them, accepting that scale and scalability are also political and moral spaces, and that the ‘non-scalable’ (Tsing 2015) should not be lost from analysis.
Doing so may open spaces for the larger issues of complex synergies between biosocial entities otherwise too often conceptualised as distinct, as well as the definition of environment, which in anthropology is closely related to the fluid engagement with the concept of context. Our book requires a move beyond the Darwinist luggage of adaptive evolution that has provided not only the core of biological determinism up to its human genomic climax, but has also spilled over into many other domains, as shown in this volume.
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Chapter 1 Permeable Bodies and Environmental Delineation
Margaret Lock
The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. (Carson 1962, 197)
Traumatised environments
A group of experts speaking at an International Geological Congress in late August 2016 declared that the geological epoch known as the Holocene through which humans have lived during the past 11,000 years and longer has been eclipsed. We are now living in the Anthropocene, an era characterised by cumulative destructive human activity on earth itself, much of it seemingly irreversible. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty highlights the peculiarity of this new epoch: ‘the Anthropocene spells the collapse of the Kantian distinction between natural history and human history’ (Chakrabarty 2009). He bases this assertion on abundant evidence that, in contrast to previous epochs, humans are the primary force transforming the globe today, with enormous effects on human health and wellbeing. Conferences about the Anthropocene started to take place long before its formal declaration, and between 2013 and 2015, 27 had already occurred.
Numerous mineral compounds, including more than 500 million metric tonnes of pure aluminium, have been manufactured since the Second World War, much of which has sedimented into earth’s layers. Even more striking are ‘mineraloids’ – glass and plastics – 300 million tonnes of which are made annually and are present everywhere on the earth’s crust and in all the oceans. As each couple of minutes pass, Coca-Cola produces 9,000 new plastic bottles. Concrete, a rock of our own making, encases much