Paper short abstract:

Drawing on an in-depth ethnography of Western-funded human microbiome projects in Africa, I will analyse how Western scientists can reproduce post-colonial racial categories and stereotypes, and how these conceptualizations can be challenged by interdisciplinary collaborations with anthropologists.

Paper long abstract:

Microbiome research, the genetic analysis of the bacteria living on and within human bodies, has significantly expanded our ability to explore microbes’ role in human health and diseases. As a scientific effort born in the Global North, however, its practices and researchers can perpetuate patterns of scientific colonialism when sampling human microbes in Africa. As the byproduct of Eurocentric historicism, microbiome research can reproduce orientalist legacies in its conceptualization of African bodies and lifestyles (Maroney 2017; Raffaetà 2022). It can rely on a temporal framework that positions non-Western populations as living representations of humanity’s microbial past, effectively relegating them to “the waiting room of history” (Chakrabarty 2007). This presentation is based on prolonged, in-depth ethnographic research on Western-funded human microbiome projects in Africa, and on semi-structured interviews with scientists based in the Global North. In carrying out this research, I also participated actively in the knowledge production process, and my positioning and anthropological background has had a transformative process on how Western scientists conceptualize African subjects. Drawing from Post Colonial Science Studies (Prasad 2023), especially those foregrounding race as a key site where scientific knowledge is extracted (Ferreira da Silva 2007; McKittrick 2015), I will analyze both how microbiome science can perpetuate racial disparities through its practice, and how a place-based, situated anthropological knowledge can contribute to a better-informed, more equitable science. I mobilize Elizabeth Roberts (2021)’s concept of “bioethnographic collaboration” to show what happens when social scientists are brought in in the ontological phases of life science research.