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 4959 at 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 4959 at 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.”

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.

Latour, Bruno. 1996. “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications.” Soziale Welt 47 (4): 369–81. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40878163.

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.