The human microbiome is an important emergent area of cross, multi and transdisciplinary study. The complexity of this topic leads to conflicting narratives and regulatory challenges. It raises questions about the benefits of its commercialisation and drives debates about alternative models for engaging with its publics, patients and other potential beneficiaries. The social sciences and the humanities have begun to explore the microbiome as an object of empirical study and as an opportunity for theoretical innovation. They can play an important role in facilitating the development of research that is socially relevant, that incorporates cultural norms and expectations around microbes and that investigates how social and biological lives intersect. This is a propitious moment to establish lines of collaboration in the study of the microbiome that incorporate the concerns and capabilities of the social sciences and the humanities together with those of the natural sciences and relevant stakeholders outside academia. This paper presents an agenda for the engagement of the social sciences with microbiome research and its implications for public policy and social change. Our methods were informed by existing multidisciplinary science-policy agenda-setting exercises. We recruited 36 academics and stakeholders and asked them to produce a list of important questions about the microbiome that were in need of further social science research. We refined this initial list into an agenda of 32 questions and organised them into eight themes that both complement and extend existing research trajectories. This agenda was further developed through a structured workshop where 21 of our participants refined the agenda and reflected on the challenges and the limitations of the exercise itself. The agenda identifies the need for research that addresses the implications of the human microbiome for human health, public health, public and private sector research and notions of self and identity. It also suggests new lines of research sensitive to the complexity and heterogeneity of human–microbiome relations, and how these intersect with questions of environmental governance, social and spatial inequality and public engagement with science.

No abstract

Modern orthopaedic prosthetics imitate biological organs or their functions, interacting with the body of amputees, and are designed and manufactured corporately. Thus, prosthetics constitute a privileged vantage point to witness the intermingling of society and nature, as well as how biosocial relations and institutions are understood, negotiated, and constituted. We develop methodologies of apprenticeship with a worldwide corporate leader in the development and manufacture of non-invasive orthopaedics, to explore the biosocial relations, the tropes, and the institutions involved in the research and development of lower-limb prosthetics. The ethnography reveals how understandings of biosocial relations are influenced by and simultaneously permeate corporate institutional practices, constituting specific organic tropes, such as the corporate skin. This trope reflects the continuous negotiation of understandings of what the skin is and what it does, of the biosocial relations associated with it, of the history of the company, its products, and how its institutional practices are being shaped by these understandings.

No abstract

No abstract

In Amerindian ontologies, hallucinations or visions, rather than being dismissed as delusions or symbolic constructs, are recognized as means of perceptual access to physical reality. Lowland South American shamans claim to be able to diagnose and treat infectious diseases, and to assess the status of wildlife resources through interactions with pathogenic agents perceived in visions. This essay examines some perceptual capabilities that shamans might be employing to explore their physical reality. The structure of the eye affords a form of microscopy of retinal structures and of objects flowing within them, including cells and microbial agents during systemic infection. Lowland South American shamanic practices involve optical and physiological conditions that optimize entoptic microscopy. Images of those visions display the characteristic features of shadow formation, confirming their microscopic origin. This phenomenological access to the microscopic world and similarities with the panorama depicted by current microbiology indicate the commensurability of these forms of knowledge.

This article builds upon Amerindian epistemologies and develops a perspectival ethnography of industrial Northwestern European skilled modes of engaging with wild fish. It explores Amerindian perspectivism as an ethnographic methodology grounded on animic premises: subject or object status are relative and relational, experience is intersubjective; the body is permeable, and its perspectives can be exchanged through tools and mimetic processes. Thus subjectivity is collectively constituted and the fundamental means of knowing, leading to the acknowledgement of subjectivity in others. Documenting a perspectival exchange guided by Shetland fishers trawling for monkfish, the article focuses on some possible dynamics and affective affordances involved in gutting processes. Gutting is physically and emotionally taxing labour that involves brief but intimate encounters with responsive beings that may offer effective resistance, affecting fishers or damaging their own value as catch. It entails the possibility of developing an intimate knowledge of fish anatomy, ecology, and behaviour, as well as potentially awareness of fish suffering and fishiness, an empathic quality. The research reveals how Shetland fishers maintain animic modes of learning and being in their understandings of the body and fish. The ethnography presents first-hand insights into 'relations of trust', which, although widely reported, continue to be dismissed as implausible. These relations and their dynamics are further attested through Shetlands háfwords and other language practices that establish synecdochical relations between fishers and fish, restricting violence and making it endurable. These insights problematize violence, illustrating the social skills of fishing and the political dynamics of predation, suggesting paths towards addressing cruelty.

No abstract