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)
Mentimeter poll for class: https://www.menti.com/al1udcpn2fym (or use
6189 4959 at https://menti.com.)
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
Class agenda
- The first Mentimeter poll of the day: https://www.menti.com/al1udcpn2fym (or use
6189 4959at https://menti.com.) - Presentations
- Fatima L.
- Taya W.
- Where we are in the semester: Standing on the shoulders of giants,
poised to leap into multiple ethnographic cases
- Working toward a definition of a network
- “Literally there is nothing but networks, there is nothing in between them…” (Latour 1996, 370)
- Networks describe and explain themselves to themselves. Following as a method is redescription, or it risks collapsing into merely being redescription.
- ANT “is an extremely bad tool for differentiating associations” (Latour 1996, 380). It remains to us now to “specify the types of trajectories” in different situations where we apply following and tracing as methods (Latour 1996, 380).
- The idea that a network is characterized by heterogeneity, openness, distributedness, recursivity, and interdependence is a conjecture. Does it work? Is it useful? What can we change about it?
- Presenters’ items
- Reflections on our experiences with health care, specifically pharmaceutical treatments. Does it “go to the root of the problem”? Where do we see evidence of social determinism of health and where do we see the indeterminacy of social-physical health?
- Spanish colonialism in Latin America is different and has different consequences for inequality, including health outcomes.
- How do the different authors use their ethnographic evidence and what’s better?
- Wrapping up with the second Mentimeter poll: https://www.menti.com/al1udcpn2fym (or use
6189 4959at https://menti.com.)
Do we see evidence for the social determination or indeterminacy of health?
Identify some examples of disease or illness, or simply unwellness, especially ones that are unequally experienced.
What are the root causes (the upstream) that produce poor outcomes or unequal outcomes (the downstream)?
A tree has roots and branches—it’s a hierarchical, top-down analysis of parts and wholes.
- For your examples, take a network perspective—Look for heterogeneity, openness, distributedness, interdependence, and recursion among the “causes” and the “effects” and the doctors and the patients and the drugs and all the other actants or hybrids or black boxes that are characteristic of “being X” or “having X.”