Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic data of a transnational microbiome study and contributing to debates within medical anthropology and decolonial studies, this paper examines how human microbiome science is individualising bodies and personalising medicine, producing innovation and reproducing inequalities.

Paper long abstract:

The human microbiome has been described by scientists and popular science literature alike as "our second genome", that is, as a primary "source of genetic diversity" (Grice and Segre, 2012). From a social sciences angle, the microbiome destabilises and deconstructs ontologies and epistemologies of the body as a singular entity in which microbes are antithetical to human life and wellbeing. Yet ethnographic research into what we might call a 'biosocial' (Ingold and Palsson, 2013; Meloni, 2014) understanding of multispecies ecologies remains limited. A contemporary example of a microbiome research in the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon exploring lifestyle and socio-cultural values in relation to health and disease illuminates the ways in which the production of knowledge and the choice and assemblage of biotechnologies is shaping bodies. Against the medical anthropologists Margaret Lock's and Vinh-Kim Nguyen's (2010) view of biomedicine and biotechnologies as knowledge-practices of bodily standardisation, we argue that microbiome research signal towards the individualisation of bodies in (Western) clinical practice. Contrasting a classical biopolitical tool such as the Body Mass Index (BMI) with individual microbial profiling for the development of personalised probiotics, we sustain that while the passage from standardisation to individualisation of bodies does not have a consolidating meaning, it is nevertheless an indicative move in contemporary biomedicine. Examining the tensions between inequalities and innovation associated with the individualisation of microbiome clinical practice (predominantly in Northern regions), this paper will then consider the ways in which the social sciences and humanities might reconfigure the 'biosocial' character of microbiome science.