Abstract:Racialisation and colonialism are central to sustaining (dis)embodied inequalities. We bring together our distinct ethnographic projects to explore this. The first project accompanied a microbiome expedition involving Amazonian Indigenous non/human communities, whereas the second project focussed on medical professional’ encounters with Mbya Guarani communities in the Atlantic Forest region. Both projects explore racialised assumptions of human difference and colonial extractive practices. In the case of medic… Show more
“…This argument is seconded by Núñez Casal and de Lima Hutchison (2002), who use height differences as an example of ‘embodied inequalities’ (p. 19):Anthropometry ‘discovered’ correlations between a priori racial prejudices and differences in bodily dimensions , typically of non‐Europeans, and those they deemed ‘criminals’ or of ‘lower’ classes which they believe justified their exclusionary, discriminatory and often violent imperial and national policies. (citations omitted)…”
This review article examines the meanings and materialities of human stature, from serving as a marker of human difference to shaping the socio‐spatial experiences of individuals. I introduce existing perspectives on height from various disciplines, including biomedical discourses on the factors (e.g. nutrition, genetics) that determine height, economic discourses on how the average heights of populations have changed over time, sociobiological and psychological discourses that assume a pre‐cultural, evolutionary “height premium”, and popular discourses on heightism and height discrimination. Drawing from a diverse range of scholarship since Saul Feldman called for a “sociology of stature” in the 1970s, I then present ways in which height and height differences have figured in various domains of human experience, from employment and education to sports and social relationships. Finally, I survey people's attempts to become taller or shorter, and the implicit values that inform such height‐making practices. What these figurations and practices show, I argue, is that height intersects with notions of race, class, gender, and beauty – but is irreducible to any of them, and is thus best viewed as a distinct, embodied form of distinction, difference, and inequality. I conclude by proposing a research agenda for future work.
“…This argument is seconded by Núñez Casal and de Lima Hutchison (2002), who use height differences as an example of ‘embodied inequalities’ (p. 19):Anthropometry ‘discovered’ correlations between a priori racial prejudices and differences in bodily dimensions , typically of non‐Europeans, and those they deemed ‘criminals’ or of ‘lower’ classes which they believe justified their exclusionary, discriminatory and often violent imperial and national policies. (citations omitted)…”
This review article examines the meanings and materialities of human stature, from serving as a marker of human difference to shaping the socio‐spatial experiences of individuals. I introduce existing perspectives on height from various disciplines, including biomedical discourses on the factors (e.g. nutrition, genetics) that determine height, economic discourses on how the average heights of populations have changed over time, sociobiological and psychological discourses that assume a pre‐cultural, evolutionary “height premium”, and popular discourses on heightism and height discrimination. Drawing from a diverse range of scholarship since Saul Feldman called for a “sociology of stature” in the 1970s, I then present ways in which height and height differences have figured in various domains of human experience, from employment and education to sports and social relationships. Finally, I survey people's attempts to become taller or shorter, and the implicit values that inform such height‐making practices. What these figurations and practices show, I argue, is that height intersects with notions of race, class, gender, and beauty – but is irreducible to any of them, and is thus best viewed as a distinct, embodied form of distinction, difference, and inequality. I conclude by proposing a research agenda for future work.
“…As part of this heterogenous body of critical microbial science literature, Stefan Helmreich has introduced the neologism of the ¨microbiomisation of race¨ ( 2016 , p. 67) as a framework for the re-instantiation of race through microbial genomics. Drawing on Helmreich ´s argument, Amber Benezra has recently referred to race in microbiome science as a ¨ghost variable¨, in absent presence (M’charek et al, 2014 ), and thus, characterised by its slipperiness and conflation with terms like ¨nationality¨ or ¨geographical ancestry¨ (Benezra, 2020 ; see also de Lima Hutchison & Núñez Casal, 2023 ). In this line, as I have shown elsewhere, the processes of microbiomisation involve the scientific production of molecularised, unidimensional, and essentialist social categories of difference (including race, but also gender, class) through the characterisation and classification of microbial diversity (Núñez Casal, 2019 , 2021a , 2021b , 2024 ).…”
This article reformulates Stephan Helmreich´s the ¨microbiomisation of race¨ as the historiality of otherness in the foundations of human microbiome science. Through the lens of my ethnographic fieldwork of a transnational community of microbiome scientists that conducted a landmark human microbiome research on indigenous microbes and its affiliated and first personalised microbiome initiative, the American Gut Project, I follow and trace the key actors, experimental systems and onto-epistemic claims in the emergence of human microbiome science a decade ago. In doing so, I show the links between the reinscription of race, comparative research on the microbial genetic variation of human populations and the remining of bioprospected data for personalised medicine. In these unpredictable research movements, the microbiome of non-Western peoples and territories is much more than a side project or a specific approach within the field: it constitutes the nucleus of its experimental system, opening towards subsequent and cumulative research processes and knowledge production in human microbiome science. The article demonstrates that while human microbiome science is articulated upon the microbial ‘makeup’ of non-wester(nised) communities, societies, and locales, its results and therapeutics are only applicable to medical conditions affecting rich nations (i.e., inflammatory, autoimmune, and metabolic diseases). My reformulation of ¨microbiomisation of race¨ as the condition of possibility of human microbiome science reveals that its individual dimension is sustained by microbial DNA data from human populations through bioprospecting practices and gains meaning through personalised medicine initiatives, informal online networks of pseudoscientific and commodified microbial-related evidence.
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