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Paper short abstract

Introducing this topic I consider how metabolism links environments & bodies in dynamic relation, both in process of becoming & open to change. Focusing on changing dynamics of liver disease and care, I illustrate that climate change is simultaneously a environmental, health and biomedical crisis.

Paper long abstract

This talk gives a brief introduction to the topic of the panel through attempting to situate people and climate in relation to liver disease. Anthropological work has sought to locate metabolism in people’s everyday lives, socio-cultural practices, and in wider power and structural relations, including in colonial histories of plantation agriculture and global food systems. Healthcare services, themselves part of health environments, are also implicated in metabolism with biomedical interventions (or lack of these) shaping the bodies of patients and structures of services in different ways. Metabolism here is locally situated, linking environments and bodies in (unhealthy) relation. But metabolism is, by definition, not static, and open to change, including increasing numbers of patients with metabolic-associated liver disease (MASLD). The growth of metabolic disease globally, together with increased exposure to chemical pollutants, and the ‘metabolic turn’ in the biosciences, lead Landecker (2011;2013) to suggest that ‘postindustrial’ metabolism is qualitative different to previous times. While typically associated with individual ‘lifestyle’, recent research links liver disease to climate changes in different ways, troubling ideas of individual responsibility for health and further demonstrating the limits of current biomedical frameworks. Bodies and metabolism are open and shifting, and stretch across sites, scales, and time, bodies, health and environments in dynamic relation and in a constant process of becoming. Such processes are sped up through climate change, we are simultaneously in an environmental, health and biomedical/bioscientific crises. What conceptual tools might be required? What might these bring to anthropology as a discipline?