Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark, this paper explores how social and biological circumstances interact in relation to irritable bowel syndrome, discussing how medical anthropologists can contribute to a conceptualization of such interactions in challenging medically unexplained disorders.

Paper long abstract:

In a time when many disorders can be diagnosed and treated, and biomedical progress is followed by expectations that biomedicine can cure most ailments, some disorders remain difficult to diagnose and treat, causing frustration for patients and health professionals. This paper raises the question of how to understand and care for medically unexplained gut trouble or what is often termed irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a highly prevalent disorder which evades common biomedical ways of knowing and caring? Neither etiology nor cure(s) are known yet, but IBS is presumed to be associated with people's ways of living. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two Danish outpatient gastroenterology clinics and among 18 gut troubled Danes, this paper explores how these people theorize IBS as a problem of interacting social and biological circumstances. It describes how life conditions and events may settle in the gut, making the gut a central organ for the expression of social problems or disparities. The paper discusses how medical anthropologists, through taking seriously the theories of interlocutors, may contribute to an understanding of the multicausality of emergent medically unexplained disorders and the relation between the gut and social life through concepts such as situated biologies (Lock and Nguyen 2018) and political etiologies (Hamdy 2008). The paper stresses the importance of going beyond distinctions between mind and body, biological and social, and what is inside and outside bodies, while taking seriously the role of biology and emerging biomedical research on gut microbiota and gut-brain interactions.