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