Biosocial Worlds : Anthropology of health environments beyond determinism / edited by Seeberg Jens, Roepstorff Andreas, Meinert Lotte.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Jens, Seeberg, editor.

Andreas, Roepstorff, editor.

Lotte, Meinert, editor.

Series:

Culture and health.

Culture and health

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Biology--Philosophy.

Biology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (228 pages).

Other Title:

Biosocial Worlds

Place of Publication:

London : UCL Press, 2020.

Summary:

Biosocial Worlds presents state-of-the-art contributions to anthropological reflections on the porous boundaries between human and non-human life - biosocial worlds. Based on changing understandings of biology and the social, it explores what it means to be human in these worlds. Growing separation of scientific disciplines for more than a century has maintained a separation of the 'natural' and the 'social' that has created a space for projections between the two. Such projections carry a directional causality and so constitute powerful means to establish discursive authority. While arguing against the separation of the biological and the social in the study of human and non-human life, it remains important to unfold the consequences of their discursive separation. Based on examples from Botswana, Denmark, Mexico, the Netherlands, Uganda, the UK and USA, the volume explores what has been created in the space between 'the social' and 'the natural', with a view to rethink 'the biosocial'. Health topics in the book include diabetes, trauma, cancer, HIV, tuberculosis, prevention of neonatal disease and wider issues of epigenetics. Many of the chapters engage with constructions of health and disease in a wide range of environments, and engage with analysis of the concept of 'environment'. Anthropological reflection and ethnographic case studies explore how 'health' and 'environment' are entangled in ways that move their relation beyond interdependence to one of inseparability. The subtitle of this volume captures these insights through the concept of 'health environment', seeking to move the engagement of anthropology and biology beyond deterministic projections.

Contents:

Introduction

1. Permeable bodies and environmental delineation

2. Situating biologies. Studying differentiation as material-semiotic practice

3. Pig-human relations in neonatology: knowing and unknowing in a multi-species collaborative

4. Anthropology's end to biodeterminism: a new sociobiology

5. Tribes without rulers: bacteria life in the human holobiont

6. Biosocial dynamics of multidrug-resistant Tuberculosis: a bacterial perspective

7. When sickness comes in multiples: co-morbidity in Botswana

8. Legacies of violence: the communicability of spirits and trauma in Northern Uganda

9. Extinction and time amid climate change or, what is a Horizon?.

Notes:

Description based on: online resource; title from PDF information screen (JSTOR, viewed May 11, 2023).

Includes bibliographical references and index.