CULTURE AND HEALTH
Series Editors
A. David Napier and Anna-Maria Volkmann
Culture and Health explores a wide range of subjects that cross disciplinary borders, exploring the contexts – social, cultural, psychological, environmental and political – in which health and wellbeing are created and sustained. Focusing on new and emerging challenges in health-related fields, the series is an engaging and reliable resource for researchers, policymakers and general readers committed to understanding the complex drivers of health and illness.
A. David Napier is Professor of Medical Anthropology, UCL, and Director of UCL’s Science, Medicine and Society Network.
Anna-Maria Volkmann is a medical anthropologist and health psychologist, and the UCL Research Lead for the Cities Changing Diabetes programme.
Biosocial Worlds
Anthropology of health environments beyond determinism
Edited by Seeberg Jens, Roepstorff Andreas and Meinert Lotte
First published in 2020 by
UCL Press
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk
Collection © Editors, 2020
Text © Contributors, 2020
Images © Contributors and copyright holders named in captions, 2020
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1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library.
This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Seeberg, J., Roepstorff, A. and Meinert, L. (eds). 2020. Biosocial Worlds: Anthropology of health environments beyond determinism. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787358232
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ISBN: 978-1-78735-825-6 (Hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78735-824-9 (Pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78735-823-2 (PDF)
ISBN: 978-1-78735-826-3 (epub)
ISBN: 978-1-78735-827-0 (mobi)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787358232
Contents
Introduction
Jens Seeberg, Andreas Roepstorff and Lotte Meinert
1. Permeable Bodies and Environmental Delineation
Margaret Lock
2. Situating Biologies: Studying Human Differentiation as Material-Semiotic Practice
Jörg Niewöhner
3. Pig–Human Relations in Neonatology: Knowing and Unknowing in a Multi-Species Collaborative
Mette N. Svendsen
4. Anthropology’s End to Biodeterminism: A New Sociobiology
A. David Napier
5. Tribes without Rulers: Bacteria Life in the Human Holobiont1
Allan Young
6. Biosocial Dynamics of Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis: A Bacterial Perspective
Jens Seeberg
7. When Sickness Comes in Multiples: Co-morbidity in Botswana
Julie Livingston
8. Legacies of Violence: The Communicability of Spirits and Trauma in Northern Uganda
Lotte Meinert and Susan Reynolds Whyte
9. Extinction and Time amid Climate Change or What is a Horizon?
Adriana Petryna
Afterword: Getting Closer?
Anna Tsing
Index
Figure 1.1 ‘The Epigenetic Landscape’. Source: Waddington, C. H. 1966. Principles of Development and Differentiation. New York and London: Macmillan. Wellcome Collection. CC BY-NC 4.0.
Figure 4.1 ‘Expression of Arrest’. Source: GollgGForce. CC BY 2.0.
Figure 4.2 Examples of challenges to diabetes care across policy domains. Provided by the author.
Figure 4.3 Variability of preferred body size. Source: Chukwunonso, E. E. 2015. ‘Body shape dissatisfaction is a “normative discontent” in a young-adult Nigerian population: A study of prevalence and effects on health-related quality of life’, Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health 5 (4, Supplement 1): S19–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jegh.2015.07.003.CC BY NC-ND 4.0.
Figure 4.4 The ‘rule of have-nots’. Provided by the author.
Figure 6.1 Trends for notified TB and MDR/RR-TB cases in India. Data source: http://www.who.int/tb/data.CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.
Figure 9.1 Transformation of a puffer fish into an ocean sunfish (mola mola). Source: On Growth and Form (Thompson 1917).
Figure 9.2 ‘The Epigenetic Landscape’. Source: Waddington, C. H. 1966. Principles of Development and Differentiation. New York and London: Macmillan. Wellcome Collection. CC BY-NC 4.0.
Julie Livingston is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and of History at New York University. She is interested in the body as a moral condition and mode of experience, and taxonomies and the relations that challenge them. Her most recent projects include Self-Devouring Growth: A planetary parable as told from Southern Africa, and Collateral Afterworlds (co-edited with Zoë Wool), a special issue of Social Text. The recipient of numerous awards, in 2013 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Margaret