Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork among reproductive toxicologists in China, I show how longstanding ideas of mutual resonance and the oneness of heaven, earth and humans harmonize with biomedical epigenetic research, reconfiguring understandings of the interconnectivity between human and non-human health.

Paper long abstract:

Medical anthropologists have often highlighted characterizations of the body and health that go beyond the biological (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). Through Chinese medicine (Farquhar 1996) or spirit possession (Ong 2010), anthropologists have shown that the body is both cultural and natural, biological and symbolic. In this paper I think further about how ideas of the body are being transformed, not in anthropology but in the biomedical sciences. Based on fieldwork among reproductive toxicologists in China, I discuss how longstanding ideas of mutual resonance (Hsu 1999) and the oneness of heaven, earth and humans (tianrenheyi) (Zhan 2012) harmonize with contemporary toxicological understandings of reproductive health that go "beyond the body proper" (Lock and Farquhar 2007). For example, in toxicological studies of male infertility, unhealthy occupational, atmospheric and national environments are taken within the body and come out again as low quality sperm, a finding that is compounded when studied for its transgenerational effects. With increasing international scientific embrace of the idea that environments have inheritable impacts on the health of future generations, solving human reproductive dilemmas becomes a problem that cannot be addressed at the level of the individual or the biological. Instead "the environment" - however defined - becomes the site of necessary biomedical intervention. I argue that such an ethical commitment to "the environment" might be thought of not as a step toward a post-humanist medical anthropology, but instead as a move toward understanding short and long-term human health as deeply intertwined with the health of the planet.