Paper short abstract:

Emerging from art-anthropological fieldwork in post-disaster, post-nuclear Japan, this paper will consider the porosity of bodies and boundaries, and other socio-material-entanglements, through forms of radiation protection, and in light of feminist theories.

Paper long abstract:

This paper emerged from ongoing interdisciplinary anthropological and artistic practice - responses to the post-disaster context in Japan following the earthquake, tsunami and radiation 'accident' in 2011. It will reflect on the porosity of bodies and boundaries, and other material-entanglements, through forms of radiation 'protection'.

Conflict between 'expert' science and 'citizen' science highlights how active questioning of nuclear effects, of what can be known, has been criticised, even leading to the pathologisation of (women's) anxiety. Despite entrenched gender roles, women have engaged in collective actions, yet the body, their bodies and the bodies of their families, are porous sites of struggle on many levels. Radiation pollution alters human bodies - and probably all organic substances - at a cellular level. Experiments in 'protection' range from the talismanic to active bacterial cultures, to inorganic matter (e.g. derivatives of boron, with the capacity to act as a buffer between flesh and radioactively polluted environments, but which is also toxic to fertility). These relations, or buffers, may be 'real', anticipated, or merely optimistic. My aim here is not to reproduce what Latour has called 'body talk' (2004), but to materially explore the idea that bodies do not end with our skin (Mol 2002). I will draw on feminist theories (including Donna Haraway and Karen Barad) to consider larger questions about responsibility and accountability, as well as how these entanglements of body-matters in a post-nuclear ecology might be thought of ecologically, in multiple ways.

Paper short abstract:

The idea of "toxic stress" pushes anthropologists to reimagine materiality. Activists, scientists, and childbearing people in California understand experiences, thoughts, and feelings to be intertwined with the body's physical makeup via genes and hormones, which are passed on in reproduction.

Paper long abstract:

California is one of the most toxic places in the United States, its reputation for "sustainability" notwithstanding. From silicon waste to agricultural runoff to poor air quality, problematic chemicals are disrupting communities' health and ability to reproduce themselves. But stress can also be experienced as toxic, and is increasingly considered so in discourse about reproduction. This definition of "toxicity" pushes against the boundaries of the material world, as the body's physicality at the smallest scales is understood to be contingent upon (or at least deeply intertwined with) experiences, thoughts, and feelings. From racism's epigenetic "weathering" effects, to the "cortisol-overload" of fast-paced urban lives, stress is conceived of as being manifest in genes and hormones that linger in the body and get passed on through reproduction. Drawing on recent ethnographic fieldwork with activists, scientists, and childbearing people located in Northern California and the Central Valley, this paper argues that anthropological concerns with toxicity and environment must include "immaterial" experiences and affects broadly conceived as stress. In turn, anthropological conceptions of the material world must loosen and become more porous, effectively adapting the "anthropological imagination" to better comprehend and explore such timely issues.

Paper short abstract:

The recent turn to post-genomic science examines health and disease by exploring how environments expand into bodies. Taking its cues from work with stem cell researchers, this paper suggests that in the process the microenvironment itself has been turned into a potent tool of biological control.

Paper long abstract:

According to post-genomic science, stem cells inhabit particular bodily niches. It is in these habitats in the body, shared with other human and non-human cells, that stem cells can grow and reproduce. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Scottish scientists, this paper explores how laboratory researchers use the niche, a particular notion of embodied ecologies, to intervene in biological matter. Specifically focused on the laboratory practice of reprogramming of cells, I explore how the niche is used as powerful tool in the post-genomic control of biology. My research engages recent anthropological scholarship, which demonstrates the co-production of the biological and the social in a context where environments expand into bodies. While the effects of embodied ecologies on individual responsibility and societal accountability have been demonstrated, my work suggests that the niche allows scientists to dramatically reshape cellular constitution and form by turning microenvironments themselves into tools. I argue that this re-tooling of the niche not only changes how scientists perceive their role in relation to the biology they study, it also produces growing concerns and uncertainties about the resilience of the body.

Paper short abstract:

Environmental materialsymbolic practices may be embodied as biological responsiveness through epigenetic processes which may impinge on future health over the generations. The epigenetic turn goes well beyond biomolecularising "culture" and fosters a new opportunity for anthropological enquiry.

Paper long abstract:

Humans are niche builders in a way that none other organism has been, especially in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. Our material-symbolic practices produce complex environments for human biosocial becomings. For the post-genomic turn the emphasis is now on complex regulatory systems of development at multiple scales. Relevant scientific research shows that ontogenetic niches of adversity -as embodied political economies landscapes of inequality, deprivation, and abuse- during critical developmental windows may have long term consequences for health and wellbeing. Nutritional insult, xenobiotic exposure, caring deprivation, psychoemotional suffering, stress, and trauma, may elicit epigenetically mediated biochemical, hormonal, metabolic, and/or neuropshicological disruptions. Entangled materialities, agency, and biopolitics come together when accounting for a biosocial approach to our life courses. But not only. Either by the parental/ancestors male/female germ line or through embryo-foetus-child biochemical relations with the mother/carer during the pre, peri and/or postnatal period, specific epigenomic states of progenitors (F0) may be pre-programmed and/or re-programmed in offspring (F1, F2 and possibly F3). By way of these inter and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance systems, crossgenerational cycles of illnesses and disease may bolster the disenfranchisement of offspring, perpetuating social cleavages of inequality and lack of opportunities over time. Epigenetics is becoming a field for anthropological enquiry. The epigenetic 'turn' goes far beyond the "biomolecularising" of "culture" and entails a crosdisciplinary approach based on imaginative hybrid epistemo-ontologies that ignores the artificiality of conventional boundaries. Political and ethical issues, social responsibility and health policies are also at stake: if the genome was not our destiny, neither is our epigenome.