The perils and promises of microbial abundance: Novel natures and model ecosystems, from artisanal cheese to alien seas

Paxson, Heather; Helmreich, Stefan

doi:10.1177/0306312713505003

Cited by 151 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…These may include bodies, but they may take us to places -e.g. microbial modelling (Paxson and Helmreich 2013), global circulatory systems (Nading 2016), crosscritter viruses (Lowe and M€ unster 2016;Grant 2016;Kelly 2012), or the commensality of walking and feeding (Ibañez Martin 2015) -where bodies constrain our analytic capacities. Indeed, when it comes to fashioning a medical anthropology that is not centred upon bodies, we could easily draw inspiration from the corpus of Schepher Hughes, who has devoted recent decades to tracing the uneven circulation of organs across vast geospatial terrain, or Lock, who has studied the sciences of dementia and epigenetics in a way that interrupts bodily boundaries by distributing bodies across personhood and time.…”

Section: Postscript: Planetary Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Counting bodies? On future engagements with science studies in medical anthropology

Yates‐Doerr

2017

Anthropology & Medicine

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Thirty years ago, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock outlined a strategy for 'future work in medical anthropology' that focused on three bodies. Their article -a zeitgeist for the fieldsought to intervene into the Cartesian dualisms characterizing ethnomedical anthropology at the time. Taking a descriptive and diagnostic approach, they defined 'the mindful body' as a domain of future anthropological inquiry and mapped three analytic concepts that could be used to study it: the individual/ phenomenological body, the social body, and the body politic. Three decades later, this paper returns to the 'three bodies'. It analyses ethnographic fieldwork on chronic illness, using a rescriptive, practice-oriented approach to bodies developed by science studies scholars that was not part of the initial three bodies framework. It illustrates how embodiment was a technical achievement in some practices, while in others bodies did not figure as relevant. This leads to the suggestion that an anthropology of health need not be organized around numerable bodies. The paper concludes by suggesting that future work in medical anthropology might embrace translational competency, which does not have the goal of better definitions (better health, better bodies, etc.) but the goal of better engaging with exchanges between medical and non-medical practices. That health professionals are themselves moving away from bodies to embrace 'planetary health' makes a practice-focused orientation especially crucial for medical anthropology today.

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Section: Postscript: Planetary Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Counting bodies? On future engagements with science studies in medical anthropology

Yates‐Doerr

2017

Anthropology & Medicine

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“…[4,43,44] Yet a recent collaboration between evolutionary biologists, microbiologists, and archeologists has usefully pointed to how human practices and living conditions in proximity to livestock have shaped microbial exposures. Social scientists www.advancedsciencenews.com www.bioessays-journal.com from anthropology, history, geography, politics, and economics have neither participated in nor led microbiome studies in great numbers.…”

Section: Social Sciences and Microbiome Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multidisciplinarity in Microbiome Research: A Challenge and Opportunity to Rethink Causation, Variability, and Scale

et al. 2019

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This essay, written by a biologist, a microbial ecologist, a biological anthropologist, and an anthropologist-historian, examines tensions and translations in microbiome research on animals in the laboratory and field. The authors trace how research questions and findings in the laboratory are extrapolated into the field and vice versa, and the shifting evidentiary standards that these research settings require. Showing how complexities of microbiomes challenge traditional standards of causation, the authors contend that these challenges require new approaches to inferences used in ecology, anthropology, and history. As social scientists incorporate investigations of microbial life into their human studies, microbiome researchers venture into field settings to develop mechanistic understandings about the functions of complex microbial communities. These efforts generate new possibilities for cross-fertilizations and inference frameworks to interpret microbiome findings. Microbiome research should integrate multiple scales, levels of variability, and other disciplinary approaches to tackle questions spanning conditions from the laboratory to the field.

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“…It attunes ethnography to the materials and techniques sought after to gauge and stabilize patterns suffused with differences. As Heather Paxson and Stefan Helmreich (, 173) note in their work on microbes, “Microbes embody potential not because of their brute materiality, but because they can be enrolled in modeling, and thereby shaping, new food science and politics.” The stories of the vada pav interrupt a smooth scan over the field of street food that may mistakenly identify efforts to transform food as easily predictable and thus easily translatable into politics. The differences in these stories clarify what kinds of arrangements between foods and politics are bearable amid efforts to conserve or strain patterns.…”

Section: Conclusion: the Slash Of The Streetmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Food processing calls forth an apparatus of industry focused on changing discernible ingredients and distilling contaminants from a pure product. Processing also can be understood as a mode of value transformation, as raw elements become food through craft and industrial food sciences (Paxson ; Paxson and Helmreich ; Weiss ). I define processing in this light: it is a transformation that imparts value.…”

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confidence: 99%

"The Taste No Chef Can Give": Processing Street Food in Mumbai

Solomon

2015

Cult. Anthropol.

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This article examines a Mumbai street food called the vada pav. I describe how a local political party branded its own version of the food, elaborate how streetside vendors make and sell the food, and then show how corporate franchises inspired by McDonald’s rendered the vada pav “safe” and “clean” through mechanized processing. In contrast to treating the street as an empty container inside which food is placed, this article elaborates how the street is critical for changing a food from one version to another. I argue that the street lies at the heart of what I will describe as attempts at food processing. Food processing isolates raw ingredients; it singles them out to transform a food into something else. My aim is to expand what processing might entail across sites of vernacular politics and intensified corporatization. Differences in possible transformations allow for guesses about how one thing transforms into another. The particular relationship of the vada pav to the street shapes what kind of guesswork is necessary to understand processing’s political and social effects. The street marks efforts to transform the vada pav, and, accordingly, ideologies and acts of processing must move beyond a focus on location to accommodate how the street generates possibilities for urban life.

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The perils and promises of microbial abundance: Novel natures and model ecosystems, from artisanal cheese to alien seas

Cited by 151 publications

References 63 publications

Counting bodies? On future engagements with science studies in medical anthropology

Counting bodies? On future engagements with science studies in medical anthropology

Multidisciplinarity in Microbiome Research: A Challenge and Opportunity to Rethink Causation, Variability, and Scale

"The Taste No Chef Can Give": Processing Street Food in Mumbai

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