Anthrograph

Class notes

Week 5: Our ecologies, ourselves: Food, nutrition, and health as hybrid objects

Week 5: Our ecologies, ourselves: Food, nutrition, and health as hybrid objects

ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs—Technology and society (Semester 2, 2025)
September 5, 2025

Main reading: Yates-Doerr (2020); Hardin (2021); Roberts (2017)

Other reading: Hardin and Kwauk (2015); Gugganig (2017)

Notes

Illness, disease, and health are physical, individual experiences, but they obviously aren’t equal or independent of larger social forces and trends. This is another reason why the experience of illness and health is a productive domain for anthropologists to study. A lot of conventional thinking about this issue starts from the assumption that there is an absolute difference between nature and culture, and that social forces produce inequalities, and these in turn are registered in bodies and health. Physical and bodily states are “symptoms”—pardon the pun—of social forces. In a network perspective, however, we need to see feedback loops among elements that are both social and natural.

Keywords

social determinants (of health), semiotic indeterminacy

Learning outcomes

  • Be able to identify the distinctive qualities and critical edge of ethnography influenced by the network paradigm
  • Be able to identify connections between anthropology of health and illness and social studies of science

References

Gugganig, Mascha. 2017. “The Ethics of Patenting and Genetically Engineering the Relative Hāloa.” Ethnos 82 (1): 44–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1028564.
Hardin, Jessica. 2021. “Life Before Vegetables: Nutrition, Cash, and Subjunctive Health in Samoa.” Cultural Anthropology 36 (3): 428–57. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.08.
Hardin, Jessica, and Christina Ting Kwauk. 2015. “Producing Markets, Producing People: Local Food, Financial Prosperity and Health in Samoa.” Food, Culture & Society 18 (3): 519–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2015.1043113.
Roberts, Elizabeth F. S. 2017. “What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 592–619. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.07.
Yates-Doerr, Emily. 2020. “Reworking the Social Determinants of Health: Responding to Material-Semiotic Indeterminacy in Public Health Interventions.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 34 (3): 378–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12586.