Troubling “Environments”

Abstract

Postgenomics is intended to move beyond the search for genes to explore disease as a result of genes interacting with their environment, revealing how they have relevance for health. This addition of environment confers genomic research with new cultural life, making it relevant to public health discourse, government interventions, and health disparities. Drawing on ethnographic research following an American genetics of asthma study conducted in Barbados, I explore the ways environment gets construed by the multiple communities involved-U.S. researchers, Bajan officials, medical practitioners, and patient participants. I draw on Lévi-Strauss to argue that plural competing environments give mana to the American postgenomic project as intervention on racial injustice, household practices, pollution, and other aspects of asthma.

The Anthropology of Plastics: An Agenda for Local Studies of a Global Matter of Concern

“…Recent years have seen an increasing recognition among medical anthropologists of the relationships between human and environmental health. In particular, they have drawn attention to the damaging effects of anthropogenic and anthropocenic environmental changes on human health and well‐being and the uneven distribution of these effects across populations (e.g., Baer and Singer ; Gamlin ; Janes and Corbett ; Lock ; Oliver‐Smith ; Singer , , ; Whitmarsh ). Despite the impact of plastics on health and the environment, however, there is a remarkable lack of anthropological research on plastics.…”

What is Communicable? Unaccounted Injuries and “Catching” Diabetes in an Illegible Epidemic

“…For this task, either-or labeling of contagious versus non-communicable disease proves insufficient to describe the prevalence of human-made diseases now becoming prominently visible around the world (see Seeberg and Meinert 2015;Moran-Thomas 2010). Diabetes is not an exception to, but iconic of growing chronic epidemics-such as cancer clusters (Jain 2013;Walley 2013) or the soaring prevalence of asthma and other autoimmune conditions (Fortun and Fortun 2005;Whitmarsh 2013;Kenner 2018). Talking to public health practitioners and policy makers about diabetes, I found it helpful to have a different name for this in-between territory of exposures, and came to describe it as para-communicablechronic conditions that may be materially transmitted as bodies and ecologies intimately shape each other over time, with unequal and compounding effects for historically situated groups of people.…”