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Paper short abstract

Metabolism links environments & bodies in dynamic relation, both in process of becoming & open to change. The growth of metabolic disease includes those with metabolic-associated liver disease. Its links to both individual behaviour & climate change trouble individual responsibility for the disease.

Paper long abstract

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. Through such studies, metabolism is locally situated, linking environments and bodies in (unhealthy) relation. But metabolism is, by definition, not static, and open to change. One of these changes includes increasing numbers of patients with metabolic-associated liver disease (MASLD), itself a recent re- personal classification. 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. Through such examples, metabolic processes stretch beyond individual human bodies to include those of other humans and non-humans (Mol, 2021). Bodies are porous, in process and in dynamic relation to their environments, metabolism stretching across sites, scales, and time. This includes wider environments shifts as more research connects metabolic-associated liver disease not only to individual health behaviours but also climate change, troubling ideas of responsibility for health. Both bodies and environments are in constant process of becoming.