Paper short abstract:

I use the biosociotechnical framework to analyze how the distinction between Western and non-Western microbiomes is created. I show that bio-socio-technological entanglements generate a colonial norming space bringing racial and/or cultural stereotypes, among other discriminatory tropes to science.

Paper long abstract:

The distinction between what is considered part of the West or Western and what is non-Western is central in current human microbiome research. This distinction not only differentiates populations (Xu and Knight 2015), environments, lifestyles, diets, geographical regions (e.g. Gupta et al. 2017; Deering et al. 2020) and microbiome collectives (Vangay et al. 2018), but also generates a colonial norming space. In other words, West and non-Western, like other classification systems and dichotomies, describe and prescribe the populations labeled as such based on values inherited from allegedly extinct but alive colonial relations (Bowker and Star 2000; Anderson 2002).

In this presentation I argue that we can use the biosociotechnical to analyze the way scientists separate what counts as Western from what counts as non-Western. I conceptualized the biosociotechnical as a triangulation between the bio, the social and the technical that makes possible specific ways of differentiation. Diets, microbes, environments, health and disease, habits, lifestyles, geographical regions, ancestry estimations and microbial species identification, are defined and made relevant by technoscientific practices directing biological and anthropological knowledge involved in creating this knowledge. Given that Western biological and anthropological knowledge is a product of colonialism, this differentiation process is permeated by colonial values like racial hierarchies in the shape of new biosocial versions of race (Chellappoo and Baedke 2023) or archaic distinctions of culture as civilized and primitive and other inherited tropes (Benezra 2022). This conclusion calls into question international research focusing on Western and non-Western regions, the characterization of non-Western environments as pristine, non-Western microbiomes as healthier, and the non-Western lifestyles as less urbanized. More importantly, the coloniality of the West/non-West divide challenges the legitimacy of recruiting subjects of study in non-Western regions to improve global health.