Introduction: Storying Cultural and Biological Diversity

Social Anthropology, 2024

This article is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license as part of Berghahn Open Anthro, a subscribe-to open model for APC-free open access made possible by the journal's subscribers.

Acta Theologica , 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic calls for a critical introspection into our way of being human in relation to other forms of life on this planet. Given that social hierarchies attribute higher and lower status to human beings based on their race, class, caste and gender identity, and legitimise the exploitation of other human beings and the earth, rethinking our hierarchical positioning as "masters" of this universe becomes imperative. In this context, ecofeminist reconstruction of relationality is projected as a corrective, as it focuses on linking relationships instead of ranking relationships. In addition, the mystical notion "We Inter-Are", shared by the visionary Buddhist sage Thich Nhat Hanh, is proposed as a key for growing into a consciousness of inter-relationality with other beings on this planet, as it opens us to the infinite mystery of the deeper relatedness of all forms of life. Viewed from this perspective, the pandemic can become a defining moment in the evolutionary story of human beings.

American Anthropologist, 2022

Biocultural approaches in anthropology originated from a desire to dissolve the nature/culture divide that is entrenched in the discipline. Whereas biocultural approaches were born under the umbrella of medical anthropology, by the late 1990s, biology-centered approaches to bioculturalism had been mostly taken up by human biologists in biological anthropology. It was at this point that biology-inclined approaches began to gel into an informal interdiscipline, biocultural anthropology. Much like any other discipline, biocultural anthropology developed research and professional norms with erected boundaries around acceptable work and workers. We draw from scholarly work in interdisciplinary studies to explore those norms and boundaries from the perspective of our collaborative, multimethod, and interdisciplinary project that combines "biology" and "culture" in unconventional ways. We provide examples of the obstacles, barriers, and risks we experienced and the costs exacted on the research project and the researchers due to the nature of our boundary crossings. By exploring biocultural anthropology from the edges of acceptability, we expose the unacknowledged boundary work in contemporary biocultural anthropology, and by extension, in its parent discipline, anthropology.

Postmodern Openings, 2020

The paper represents a view on a plausible way of development of scientific methods and methodologies of the humanitarian studies in the post-pandemic society. Starting with the analysis of the current state of “lockdown” and “isolation” in the atmosphere of fear and insecurity, the idea of better understanding the reasons for such a situation is connected with the possibilities of an interdisciplinary approach, called “biosemiotics”. In the context of paradigmatic change in the humanities, caused by the interpretative turn of deconstruction of the XX century, today’s situation with COVID-19 is also regarded to be a turning point in the history of post-modern humanity. As often happens in the periods of change and transformation, humanity searches for the answers to the questions of ontological character: What do we know about the world today? How does our knowledge of the world can help us in solving current problems and preventing further disasters? Is human knowledge sufficient to treat global problems? Biosemiotics, as an interdisciplinary scientific project, based on the assumption that life and culture are fundamentally grounded in the semiosis and are subject to biological laws of nature (Hoffmeyer, 2010) can unite a century-long divide in the scientific tradition of separation of Nature and Culture, Body and Mind. Keywords: Umwelt; Nature-friendly approach; human expansion; philosophy of life; a change in the scientific paradigm.

2019

Discourses that construct the “self” as something to be fixed, or made whole, chart a retreat from relational ecosystems back to the individual, reinforcing colonial politics rooted in bounded individualism. This project animates an ontological, relational framework that, in detaching from liberal humanist discourses of healing and “self,” makes affective links from autopoietic frameworks for healing and survival to de-colonial, sympoieitic concerns for expanded kinship. New meanings and attachments are forged within queasy border zones of incommensurability, toggling between the particular and the universal, between desires for solidarity and recognition that colonial violences continue to be unequally distributed and borne. Inhabiting these spaces as a scholar, not disentangling from the thickness of grief, means deploying methods and methodologies that can accommodate ontological disturbance and refusal as they grate against colonial logic. By recording pressure points of friction as they emerge in ordinary life, narratives, terms, and practices emerge to illuminate what it might mean to liberate “healing” from the terms of neoliberal, settler citizenship. The goal is not to resolve paradox, but to confront it by writing within and between the limits of scholarship and conventions that assume bounded self-hood. Aspiring beyond social solutions based in liberal humanist frameworks means subverting all forms of scholarly practices and categories based in Western hegemonies and hierarchies of being. What could a future look like in which co-poietic, sympoietic terms prevail; where the terms of speaking, writing, being, touching, and imagining do not hold allegiance to liberal humanist lineages of colonial selfhood?

2018

We outline four perspectives on the body that have emerged from ethnographic research on (bio)medicine. We describe these with particular attention to the way they relate ‘nature’ and ‘culture.’ All four approaches engage the human body through ‘culture’ as meaning or practice. The material body is either implicitly treated as universal or particularized through discourse, experience or practice. Trying to stake out a middle ground between material universality and cultural particularity, we discuss the potential within these approaches for an anthropological engagement with the evolution of human bodies over time. In concluding, we use the case of the entanglement of mental illness and urban environments to underscore four modes of engaging the situated body-in-action through long-term, co-laborative ethnographic research.

American Anthropologist, 2021

Rituals of Coexistence

The global pandemic not only challenges health systems and the economy. It deeply transforms our everyday lives and the ways in which we coexist. People have to find new definitions of what it means to be close to one another, to show empathy and to comfort each other. With social distancing being the word of the hour, we learn how to use digital technologies for creating novel forms of closeness. The virus becomes the new other, the alien force that invisibly permeates social life. It finds its hosts predominantly in the places where humans get close to each other: When we eat, or meet for drinks. It is the ritual of eating, drinking, and dancing that binds together an otherwise largely disembodied culture. Culinary culture for example is a rich, vivid and last but not least very much embodied part of today's societies, that is in many cases deemed to be an intangible cultural heritage. This paper aims at describing the changes in human bodily communion with regard to the incorporation of new technologies and the need for embodied practices of resonance. My theoretical perspective combines a phenomenological description of changing practices with a philosophical posthumanist outlook on what it means to be human in the global pandemic.

2007

This course explores new modes of writing and researching in anthropology. Multispecies ethnography considers nonhuman life as objects of analysis—animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, and viruses—as having political lives and import. By studying how these nonhuman life forms interact with human life, multispecies ethnographers and anthropologists studying " life " – from the human down to the microbe, must engage in multiple worlds, from the jungle to the laboratory, from the field to the desk. This approach interrogates how distinctions between nature and culture, between biological and cultural, and human and nonhuman come into being. How can a multispecies method offer new ways to investigate categories of race, gender, and sexuality? How might a multispecies approach illuminate or trouble narratives of representation, illness, language, and significance beyond the realm of the human? Where, how, and what kind of life(/s) is (are) constituted, held accountable, and conserved? This course will incorporate readings on " zoe " and " bios " , the making of species categories, relationships between the human and nonhuman, current debates on breaking with the species concept and " the rights of mother earth. " We will read the conceptual works in conjunction with current multispecies ethnographies to give grounding to the theory.