Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the biosocial is being made in the context of an emerging discourse of epigenetics and cancer in Brazil, drawing on empirical research in cancer genetic clinics and reflecting on the historical and cultural specificity of Brazil.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how the biosocial is being made in the context of an emerging discourse of epigenetics and cancer in Brazil. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken with patients, practitioners and scientists in cancer genetic clinics in southern Brazil it examines how clinical uncertainties about the meaning and significance of genes and the environments that they shape and are shaped by give licence to new ways of constituting the contingency of cancer risk among patients and practitioners. I explore how oblique and diffusely articulated clinical narratives about the variability of genetic risk focused on vague and often narrow definitions of 'environments' or fleetingly given form through reference to 'estilo de vida' or 'lifestyle' nevertheless re-vitalise 'folk' notions about cancer risk for patients articulated as embodied vulnerability linked to diet, the (self) management of health or psyche and the legacies of transgenerational emotional trauma in the family. These re-configurations of the biosocial in the context of cancer risk and epigenetics are unfolding in a region where not only the biological consequences of lived environments have long been recognized and acted upon in the application of social medicine and public health but one where contemporary 'notions of the 'bio', are often constituted as malleable and contingent (Edmonds 2010, Sanabria 2016).