Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how people make microbiota matter in relation to a future where antibiotics have stopped working – a so called post antibiotic era. How are everyday practices and human-microbes relations, renegotiated in relation to this future?

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will use the questionnaire “If antibiotics stop working” that was distributed with the help of The Folklife Archives with the Scania Music Collections at Lund University between 2017 and 2018. Over 100 replies came in and some from those who answered discussed the meaning of microbiota. In these themes, the narratives focus on the relation between food and a healthy body. Its semes as if the goal is to find a bodily balance where good and healthy bacteria can stop what is harmful and evil to the body and comes from the outside – let it be resistant bacteria, viruses, or other dangerous microbes. In this way the narratives generate imaginaries for which relationships the individual should have with microbes at large. But it is also imaginaries that can affect gut feelings and consciousness when the individual shop for food or sit down at the dinner table to eat. I will in my paper use Esposito's (2011) theories on how the body needs to be analyzed as “the negation of a negation“. In what ways do the narratives from the questionnaire problematize this theory of how the body can be reformed and refined by letting the “right” bacteria’s in? Or with other words, how is “evil” seen as something that shall be fought from inside?