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.