Short abstract

The Common Body is a conceptual and methodological tool, an epistemological practice interested in challenging the established paradigm of the immune system as a battlefield, a battle against enemies, and of the body as a (human) discrete entity, encapsulated by the limits of the skin.

Long abstract

The Common Body is a research project that examines scientific evidence on the composition and the role of the microbiota, allowing the claim for a new immunological paradigm to address ecological and health challenges.

Modern immunological science conceives the bodies as threatened by the invasion of foreigners. The motivation of invaders is always destruction, and therefore it is necessary to destroy them first. The ideological role of this imaginary is to make violent destruction as part of daily life, naturalizing violence as an immutable part of reality (Martin, 1990).

In microbiome research, the human organism is presented as composed of multiple ecosystems, a multitude, suggesting that thanatopolitical attempts to eliminate other microbials are giving way to an affirmative microbiopolitics based on generative multispecies relationality

These propositions open a new perspective on the assertion that a body is “an intricate and coordinated multitude” (Van Dooren et al., 2016).

The microbiopolitics of the human microbiome challenges the Pasteurian immune model in which the self is sustained on and defends itself against another non-self microbial (Ironstone, 2019).

Scientific evidence on the importance of the microbiota for human health claimed that the more diverse the ecosystem, the more diverse the "inner forest".

Based on ethnographic research, the proposition intend to ecologize the body, a fundamental category for anthropology, radicalizing the idea of the planet as a body, extrapolating the value of the body as an analytical category to other more-than-human entities, including the atmosphere, ecosystems, microbiota and other living beings.