In the well-known fairy tale of ‘The Ugly Duckling’ (1846), after the hatching of a brood of beautiful ducklings, a bigger egg takes longer to develop than the others. When the bird finally comes out of the egg, its large size makes it appear ugly and deformed in the eyes of the others. Initially suspected of being a turkey, the young bird, however, proves to be a good swimmer, thus passing as a duckling. However, its size, shape and behaviour make it the target of constant ridicule and rejection, leading the youngster to run away. Having miraculously survived a long and lonely winter, the ‘ugly duckling’ happens upon three beautiful swans on a fine spring day. As it approaches them with little expectation for a warm welcome, it sees its own reflection in the water, now ‘a graceful and beautiful swan’. Andersen’s well-known moral of the story, ‘to be born in a duck’s nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan’s egg’ (Andersen 1846), when understood as the allegory of human life so patiently explained by countless parents to their children, projects the biological onto the social. The story was a key to Andersen’s international breakthrough and has been widely read and made into films and theatre plays. Like all good literature, it allows for varying interpretations, focusing, for example, on parallels with Andersen’s own life (Andersen 2003), or the pain of genealogical bewilderment in children with substitute parents (Sants 1964). Across them, it certainly places innate qualities over environmental influences in the understanding of life: predetermined human being rather than human becoming, to paraphrase Ingold (2013). Despite social influences, the ‘true’ biological being will unfold at some point. The appeal of the story has made it a useful metaphor in a range of scientific contexts, including for the redemption of sympatric speciation as an organising principle in evolutionary biology (Via 2001).
In contrast, in a less well-known story by Andersen, ‘The Drop of Water’ (1847), the author illustrates the projection of the social onto nature. Since it is less known, we shall quote it at some length. The tale tells of the marvels of the magnifying glass ‘that makes everything a hundred times larger than it really is’. When looking at a drop of water through it, Creep-and-Crawl, an old man ‘who would always make the best out of everything’, sees a ferocious fight among human-like microorganisms. He magically colours them with a drop of witch blood to make them now appear like ‘naked savages’ and calls the other protagonist of the story, a nameless wizard.
The wizard who had no name looked through the magnifying glass. It actually appeared like a whole town, where all the inhabitants ran about without clothes! it was terrible, but still more terrible to see how the one knocked and pushed the other, bit each other, and drew one another about. What was undermost should be topmost, and what was topmost should be undermost!–See there, now! his leg is longer than mine!–whip it off, and away with it! There is one that has a little lump behind the ear, a little innocent lump, but it pains him, and so it shall pain him still more! And they pecked at it, and they dragged him about, and they ate him, and all on account of the little lump. There sat one as still as a little maid, who only wished for peace and quietness, but she must be brought out, and they dragged her, and they pulled her, and they devoured her!
‘It is quite amusing!’ said the wizard.
‘Yes; but what do you think it is?’ asked Creep-and-Crawl. ‘Can you find it out?’
‘It is very easy to see,’ said the other. ‘It is some great city, they all resemble each other. A great city it is, that’s sure!’ (Andersen 1847, 23–4)
The story first appeared in a collection sent to Charles Dickens in gratitude of his hospitality during Andersen’s first visit to London. Andersen took a romantic rather than a revolutionary position. Still, he was abhorred by the brutality of urban poverty at the height of industrialisation, described in Dickens’ works and echoing some of Andersen’s own early life experiences. To Andersen, the big city epitomised a primitive cruelty found in nature and in ‘naked savages’ as they had been described and construed in colonial Europe.
Invoking Andersen’s two stories allows us to argue that projections in the space between the biological and the social cannot be reduced to discussions of theory-building in biology and the social sciences. Rather, they constitute pervasive imaginations that transcend understandings of health and the body that have travelled across generations and societies. Similarly, the projections of thinkers like Darwin and Spencer may be recast as efforts to systematise ideas that were common in vaguer versions in contemporary societies.
The projection of principles of competition based on a capitalist world order onto natural evolution in Darwinism (Lewontin 1993) was followed by a projection back onto the social ordering of societies and civilisations based on the logic of ‘survival of the fittest’ of social Darwinism. Whereas these classical contributions to secular understandings of evolution have been softened since their original appearance, their neo-Darwinian incarnations are fiercely protected, as shown by Lewontin in his critique of doctrines of sociobiology (Lewontin 1993). Ingold shows how this neo-Darwinian defence work maintains the duality of the natural and the social, enabling projections between the two (Ingold 2013). Such projections carry a directional causality, and so constitute powerful means to establish discursive authority. Perhaps paradoxically, even if we argue for the de-separation of the biological and the social, it remains important to unfold the consequences of their discursive separation.
Many of the contributions in this volume point us to a gap between the two, and analyse what may be seen as projections. The works of the contributing authors open new ways to think about the biosocial in anthropology, either by way of anthropological reflection or through ethnographic case studies. Focusing primarily on the projection of the biological onto the social, the chapters point to some of the very real impacts of this duality, while also creating stepping stones for further contemplation on how to develop analytical lenses that serve to de-separate the biological and the social. For example, Livingston’s chapter provides a critique of the projection of singular disease categories onto complex situations of co-morbidity, while the chapter of Meinert and Whyte explores how categories of trauma or spirits may project different ‘plans of action’, with adjacent ideas about biology and sociality, for dealing with legacies of violence. Petryna’s chapter shows the projection of the end of the world onto the screen of climate change, behind whose horizon ‘blindsidedness’ reigns. Other chapters explore how neonatal babies are projected onto piglets (Svendsen), or the brain onto the gut (Young), or the social onto the body (Lock; Napier). While they point to the workings of projections, they also combine to show new analytical potentials to narrow and eventually close the gap between the biological and the social.
Health environment
For several decades, up to the completion of the Human Genome project in 2003, the nature–nurture debate that had been central to early American anthropology seemed to have tilted to the advantage of the ‘nature’ position, leaving only a limited space for critical dialogue. The Human Genome project was celebrated as ‘nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being’ (National Human Genome Research Institute 2015). Perhaps paradoxically, this achievement contributed to a realisation that the implied genetic predetermination of human lives and human behaviour was vastly exaggerated within the Darwinian paradigm. This led to the return of the field of epigenetics that explores the interaction between environment and activation or deactivation of genetic dispositions that influence the individual human life – and potentially the lives of subsequent generations (see Lock, this volume; Napier, this volume). Such new understanding of the malleability of human biology potentially undermines the century-long insistence within the fields of medicine and epidemiology on the universality of human biology. It calls, instead, for an understanding of local biologies, as first proposed by Lock, implying that ‘differing accounts about biological ageing are not simply the result of culturally shaped interpretations of a universal physical experience but the products […] of an ongoing dialectic between biology and culture in which both are contingent’ (Lock 1993, xxi).
At first glance, it seems as if the move from genetics to epigenetics should signal a drive to understand the role of the environment