2021
DOI: 10.1111/maq.12680
|View full text |Cite
|
Sign up to set email alerts
|

Microbial Kin: Relations of Environment and Time

Abstract: Microbiome science considers human beings supraorganisms: single ecological units made up of symbiotic assemblages of human cells and microorganisms. Microbes co‐evolve with humans, and microbial populations in human bodies are determined by environments/exposures including family, food and place, health care, race and gender inequities, and toxic pollution. Microbiomes are transgenerational links, disarrangements between different bodies and the outside world. This article asserts that microbes are kin—kin th… Show more

Help me understand this report

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...
2
1
1
1

Citation Types

0
12
0

Year Published

2022
2022
2024
2024

Publication Types

Select...
5
2

Relationship

0
7

Authors

Journals

citations
Cited by 25 publications
(12 citation statements)
references
References 45 publications
0
12
0
Order By: Relevance
“…However, any discussion of human‐microbial relationality cannot ignore the relational ontologies, sovereignties, and scholarship of Indigenous peoples without risking appropriation and erasure (Porter et al., 2020; Tallbear, 2011; Todd, 2016; Watts, 2013). Further, considering more‐than‐human thinking and kin relations and ontologies, Indigenous, Black, Queer and feminist scholars are leading the way in renewed discussions of relationality (Benezra, 2022; Tallbear, 2011). While simultaneously reclaiming relational concepts such as kin (e.g., Kanngieser & Todd, 2020), they are showing how microbes ‘take up new (old) kinship formulations … [as] oddkin, chemical kin, cohort kin, environmental kin, situated kin [and] Land/body relations’ while arguing for relational accountability (Benezra, 2022, p. 512).…”
Section: The Microbiomes Of Human Bodiesmentioning
confidence: 99%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…However, any discussion of human‐microbial relationality cannot ignore the relational ontologies, sovereignties, and scholarship of Indigenous peoples without risking appropriation and erasure (Porter et al., 2020; Tallbear, 2011; Todd, 2016; Watts, 2013). Further, considering more‐than‐human thinking and kin relations and ontologies, Indigenous, Black, Queer and feminist scholars are leading the way in renewed discussions of relationality (Benezra, 2022; Tallbear, 2011). While simultaneously reclaiming relational concepts such as kin (e.g., Kanngieser & Todd, 2020), they are showing how microbes ‘take up new (old) kinship formulations … [as] oddkin, chemical kin, cohort kin, environmental kin, situated kin [and] Land/body relations’ while arguing for relational accountability (Benezra, 2022, p. 512).…”
Section: The Microbiomes Of Human Bodiesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Benezra (2020, p. 828) also writes about the problematic absence/presence of race in human microbiome research: ‘Race becomes a ghost in the scientific work, an invisible, powerful informant that affects the categorization of bodies, how difference is scientifically made and verified, and ultimately how interventions and care are applied.’ Microbiome research skates on a thin edge if it unproblematically characterises certain human communities or individuals as having microbial relations based on racial profiles and/or other lines of differentiation such as disability, gender or sexuality. As Benezra (2022, p. 512) argues, there is ‘a pressing need to decolonize ontological studies of nonhumans, particularly microbes’ because of their association with disease and abnormality.…”
Section: The Microbiomes Of Human Bodiesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In making sense of this research, we recognize a radical re‐understanding of the human body but one that has not changed expectations that the maternal body alone is responsible for infant development (Howes‐Mischel, 2018; Lappé et al., 2019). We analyze how such human:microbial distributions of reproductive labor reflect extant expectations of kinship, for as Benezra (2021) has argued, microbes are already kin. The ease with which this new research on microbial involvement in maternal materiality is incorporated reminds us this is not a new paradigm but one with historical legacies that, as we will briefly address, are always raced and classed.…”
Section: Maternal Microbismentioning
confidence: 99%
“…As an organizing system, kinship composes such forms of mutuality into intergenerational relations and orientations toward the future. Feminist anthropologists have shown that while ostensibly organized through biogenetic reproduction, the substance and meaning of those relations are neither fixed in biology nor always obvious unless we attend to practices of relatedness (Carsten, 2003), “processes of caring and being cared for” (Borneman, 1997, 574), or ecologies of reciprocal accountability (Benezra, 2021). Such attention illustrates the active dimensions of kin labor (Pande, 2014) and the classificatory nature of kinship as a heuristic for sorting out human‐human relations, human‐technology relations, and human‐animal relations.…”
Section: Microbes Kin and Reproductive Labormentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In this sense, postgenomics connection to the essentializing force of genomics is quite strong (Richardson 2013). As Le Goff, Allard, and Landecker (2021, 43) argue, “Rather than bring the continuum of genetic-epigenetic relations or their physical coexistence into view, researchers are constantly pushed to take sides in a debate cast in terms of binary formulations.” Additionally, many of the ontological claims foregrounded through postgenomics, which emphasize entanglement and interaction, have existed in philosophies and epistemologies outside of biology and biomedicine for centuries (Zhan 2011; Todd 2016; Lamoreaux 2016; Warin, Kowal, and Meloni 2020; Benezra 2021).…”
Section: The -Omics In (Post)genomicsmentioning
confidence: 99%