Short Abstract:

This roundtable seeks to further engagement with the notion of “metabolism” between STS and post-Marxist theory, in a variety of empirical settings. It asks how ethnographic methods may contribute to rethink the dynamics, politics and governance of life.

Long Abstract:

This roundtable seeks to further engagement with the notion of “metabolism”. At once a biochemical reaction and a socio-political reality, a corporeal process and an asymmetric ecology, metabolism is a concept used in multiple ways. Histories of science and STS understand metabolism as biochemical process closely related to the industrialization of life (Landecker 2013a). The latter has resulted in the biomass of livestock exceeding that of humans on the planet, and the biomass of industrially-produced chicken outstripping the global number of wild birds. Others associate metabolism with corporeal practices of eating and processing, which reorients what constitutes body and environment, relation and difference. The metabolism of cities has also been an optic for grasping urbanization, notably as a process whereby nature is transformed by labour and capital (Swyngedouw 2006), giving rise to uneven circulatory dynamics of space. Toxic intimacies are unintended but also invisibilized outcomes of industrialized metabolism. A common denominator to these diverse and disparate accounts is a corporeal politics of transformation. Alignments of bodies with their food, and the generation of materials and waste, the production of urban space –all these processes are underlined by asymmetric social relations and deeply-entrenched hierarchies of power (Meloni 2020). As such, they require circumstantiated and thick accounts that make it possible to grasp the specific coordinates of varied and situated metabolic processes. In this roundtable we initiate a conversation with these plural iterations of the metabolic to ask what it means to look at this complex process and phenomenon ethnographically. We initiate a conversation on what an anthropology of the metabolic might look like and what it might offer up for thinking about the dynamics, politics and governance of life.