Toward Intergenerational Ethnography: Kinship, Cohorts, and Environments in and Beyond the Biosocial Sciences

Abstract

Situated alongside and drawing from emerging inquiry, debate, and reflection about making and unmaking kin at a moment of critical reflection on racial, social, and reproductive inequities and changing environments, this special edition considers how anthropology can ethnographically examine and engage with intergenerational dynamics as they influence different scales and spheres of life. It brings together medical anthropologists and science and technology scholars conducting research in Bangladesh, China, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and the United States as they reflect on the un/making of kin in settings of expert knowledge production and dissemination, including practices of seed collecting, epigenetic science, birth cohort studies, social policy generation, and clinical trials. Contributors to this special issue consider how intergenerational relations and modes of transmission take form in and through biosocial research-both as an object of study and a method of analysis. [intergenerational, environmental change, kinship, biosocial] Connections between generations are increasingly understood as fundamental to individual, collective, and ecological well-being. We live, as Michelle Murphy puts it, in "intergenerational times" (2017), when the traumas, infrastructures, and exposures of the past as well as the structural inequities of the present are linked to un/livable futures. In a moment of growing concerns about planetary survival including environmental toxicity, climate change, and diminishing biodiversity, attention to intergenerational relations has taken on renewed urgency. Such urgency comes to the fore in worry about endangerment and extinction, environmental health, and the state of the planet we are leaving for future generations (Choy 2011;Dow 2016;Hoover 2018).Attention to the potential role of kinship in protecting the world and its creatures from further ecological devastation has brought to the fore calls to action, and even pleas to "make kin, not population" (Clarke and Haraway 2018; Haraway 2016).

Cultural hierarchies in health: Does inherited sociocultural position (biraderi) shape diet and nutrition among British Pakistani children? Protocol for a mixed-methods study

“…In addition to being the first study to look at biraderi-based nutritional inequalities in the UK, our study is innovative in that we will formally involve experts and users in the design and interpretation of our quantitative analyses. Participatory approaches are common in intervention and implementation research [ 50 ], but our study will be one of the first to do this in the context of planning and conducting secondary data analyses, echoing recent methodological developments in biosocial ethnography applied to cohort studies [ 51 ].…”

Situating Latin American Critical Epidemiology in the Anthropocene: The Case of COVID-19 Vaccines and Indigenous Collectives in Brazil and Mexico

“…These discussions have gained further relevance in the wake of emerging terrains of biosocial science that are directly concerned with how a range of social environments shape health, biologies, and bodies (cf. Lappé andLandecker 2019, Gibbon andLamoreaux 2022). At the same time, it is important to note how Breilh and other Latin American theorists' discussion of subsumption emerged from particular histories in the development of Latin American critical epidemiology.…”