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Oral Presentation Session - Cosponsored Status Awarded
Sponsored by: General Anthropology Division
Cosponsored by: American Ethnological Society
Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students, Those Involved in Mentoring Activities
Primary Theme: Resilience
Secondary Theme: Materiality
The idea of microbial resilience looms large among general publics across the world, as twenty-first century global pandemics have moved across species (Porter 2013) and as the threat of infection by antibiotic-resistant strands of staph, syphilis, and gonorrhea influences a variety of social and cultural behaviors (Landecker 2016, Pittet et al. 2015). While these examples may have negative or unpleasant connotations, recent archaeological research into ancient gut bacteria emphasizes that microbes have long lived with and inside humans and other multicellular life forms (Warinner and Lewis 2015). Cheese artisans studied by Heather Paxson (2008) know this, even though it is difficult to precisely know how bacterial fermentation works, as cheese-makers try to induce bacteria to work (Bear et al. 2015). The impact of microbes is not just a story of technoscience: new ethnographic research argues that that the things identified as “microbes,” following the advent of nineteenth century microbiology in Europe, may have long been recognized by Amerindian shamans (Herrera 2018). All of these examples show that microbes are key agents in the human worlds and world-making projects that interest anthropologists across the traditional four-fields and multiple subfields of anthropology. In short, microbes are vital for making “us” who “we” are.
Crossing anthropological specializations of four-fields anthropology, medical anthropology, religious studies, multispecies ethnography, animal studies, feminist anthropology, environmental studies, and science and technology studies, these papers consider ongoing social and cultural relations with microbes. The phrase “more than human” recognizes how vital nonhuman actors are in human lives, materially and otherwise (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). The papers in this session think through the concept of microbial resilience, instead of (or rather adjacent to) antibiotic resistance, as a way to move beyond martial or counterrevolutionary metaphors, in the hope that we can sincerely engage research across anthropological subfields and interdisciplinary interstices.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bear, Laura, Karen Ho, Anna Tsing, and Sylvia Yanagisako 2015. "Gens: A Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism." Last Modified March 30, 2015. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/652-gens-a-feminist-manifesto-for-the-study-of-capitalism
Herrera, Cesar E. Giraldo. 2018. Microbes and other shamanic beings. 1st edition. ed. New York, NY: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Landecker, H. 2016. "Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History." Body & society 22 (4):19-52.
Paxson, Heather. 2008. "Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States." Cultural Anthropology 23 (1):15-47.
Pittet, Didier, Hanan Balkhy, Herman Goossens, Mirko Saam, Ramanan Laxminarayan, Vincent Jarlier, Jan Kluytmans, Alex Van Belkum, and Stephan Harbarth. 2015. "Antimicrobial resistance: one world, one fight!" Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control 4 (1):1-15.
Porter, Natalie. 2013. "Bird flu biopower: Strategies for multispecies coexistence in Việt Nam." AMET American Ethnologist 40 (1):132-148.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of care : speculative ethics in more than human worlds, Posthumanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Warinner, Christina, and Cecil M. Lewis. 2015. "Microbiome and Health in Past and Present Human Populations." American Anthropologist 117 (4):740-741.
Noah Tamarkin
Assistant Professor
Ohio State University
Natalie Porter
Assistant Professor
University of Notre Dame
Rebecca Howes-Mischel
Associate Professor of Anthropology
James Madison University
Megan Tracy
Associate Professor
James Madison University
Juno Parrenas
Assistant Professor
Ohio State University
Juno Parrenas
Assistant Professor
Ohio State University
Cesar Giraldo Herrera
Somerville College, University of Oxford