For many decades, the study of society and the study of biology have been estranged from one another. There are complex reasons for this estrangement. Those reasons are rooted partly in the ways that, for a long time, biologists configured the relationship between their epistemic objects (particularly genes) and those objectsâ environmental influences; they are also partly rooted in the way that social scientists insisted, for an equally long period, on a strict division of labour between the sciences of society and the sciences of life. Yet many social scientists have now shown that a neat demarcation between the social and the biological has been largely illusory given the intense proliferation of objects, practices, and cultures that have persisted along a supposedly rigid biology/society border (Haraway 1991; Kroenfeldner 2009; Meloni 2016, reprinted here as Chap. 3). Nevertheless, the distinction between the biological and the social has become part of our everyday conceptual fabricâan inescapable metaphysics to which, to various degrees, all of us have more or less succumbed.
When considered from an historical perspective, the estrangement between knowledge of biological life and knowledge of social processes has arguably been a necessary step. Richard Lewontin famously pointed out that Darwin had to propose an impoverished model of the relationship between organism and environment in order to overcome âan obscurantist holism that merged the organic and the inorganic into an unanalyzable wholeâ (2000, 47). However, as Lewontin further noticed, often the epistemological presumptions âthat are necessary for progress at one stage in history become bars to further progress at anotherâ (ibid.). The model suggested by Darwin is in fact nowadays enriched by models (for instance, niche-construction, Odling-Smee et al. 2003) that point to a more complex relationship between organism and milieu.
A similar development has occurred in the relationship between knowledge of life processes and knowledge of society, where an initial estrangement may have been, inter alia, a productive process. If we compare the holism of nineteenth-century sociologists like Herbert Spencer, for whom there is no social advancement without corresponding biological growth, to the rejection of biological explanations proposed by turn-of-the-century social scientists such as Ămile Durkheim or Alfred Kroeber, it is arguable that this rejection was an important step on the way to a more potent understanding of social life. Today, however, that well-known self-sufficient entity, the social fact, has become an obstacle for a broader comprehension of the world in which we live, in all its inextricably biosocial or biocultural dimensions. This Handbook is an attempt to wedge us across that obstacle. It is motivated by an intuition (and it is hardly alone in this) that the time has come to reposition this historical legacy and to move beyond the acrimonious controversies that have characterized twentieth-century thought as it traversed the biology/society border.
This Handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of the extent to which, and how quickly, we are moving beyond the charged debates that characterized much âbiosocialâ thought in the twentieth century. Bringing together a compelling array of truly interdisciplinary contributions, the Handbook shows how nuanced attention to both the biological sciences and the social sciences opens up novel perspectives on some of the most significant sociological, anthropological, philosophical, and biological questions of our era. Our central assertion is that the life sciences, broadly conceived, are currently moving toward a more social view of biological processes, just as the social sciences are beginning to reincorporate notions of the biological body into their investigations.
We are perfectly aware that others have mapped this terrain before us (Fox Keller 2011; Lock 2015; Rose 1997, 2013). Nonetheless, there is work to be done to bring together the burgeoning but too often fragmented work that has powerfully emerged within that terrain. That work, in turn, has rested on some striking developments across a range of intellectual domains. We think here of work in social neuroscience, which shows not simply that the capacity for interaction is instantiated in the brain, but that brain structure and function are themselves part-produced through particular sets of environmental and social relations (see e.g., Cacioppo 2002); we think also of the discovery of adult neurogenesis in humans, the realization that parts of the adult brain continue to produce new cells through the lifetime, that these cells may have functional significance, and that they may be affected by developmental and environmental impacts (see e.g., Gould et al. 1999); and we think of the renewed emphasis on neuroplasticity, which suggests that the brain continues to change and develop as a person ages and lives (see e.g., Draganski et al. 2004). Similar developments occur in what, in molecular biology, is called the postgenomic momentâthe increasing awareness of a profound malleability of genomic functioning and a recognition of its dependence on time and place, biography and milieu, social institutions and experiences, with profound implications for the notion of biological heredity that we have received from the century of the gene (LappĂ© and Landecker 2015; Stallins et al. 2016; Meloni 2016). Today, we know that DNA expression is influenced by factors including toxins, work stress, nutrition, socio-economic status, early childhood care, perhaps even the lifestyle of oneâs mother, father, or grandparentsâall factors that at least partially exceed the traditionally biological. This new understanding, with DNA always ready to respond to environmental cues, is, somewhat paradoxically, a product of scientific advances that were expected to deepen and confirm pre-existing theories of the fixed gene.
These developments have come at a propitious time for the social sciences, and especially for social theory. As Nikolas Rose points out, âover the last decade a number of social theorists and feminist philosophers have come to realize that it is not reactionary to recognize the reality of our fleshly nature, and to examine the possibilities and constraints that flow from itâ (2007, 4). We have thus seen, in feminist theory especially, in related trends such as the âaffective turnâ and, more recently, in a body of work going under the sign of a ânew materialismâ (Coole and Frost 2010), a growing and often contested assemblage of turns to materialities, affects, ontologies, and bodiesâall of which have contributed to a corpus of theoretical work that no longer accounts for itself in terms of its distance from biologyâand, indeed, sometimes moves in quite the opposite direction (Wilson 2004, 2015; see Pedwell and Whitehead 2012, for an important overview of some of these developments). Scholars such as Donna Haraway (1997) and Karen Barad (2007), for example, have edged social scientists away from taking the natural sciences in general, and the biological sciences in particular, as mere objects or resourcesâas only practises that might be looked at, rather than with. At the risk of flattening out important distinctions between diverse perspectives, these trends undo binary oppositions between biological influences and social forces, and so have begun to legitimate social research that unpicks the separation between natural and social science.
Given the forms of erasure often built into claims to novelty (see Ahmed 2008), we are reluctant to hail only the newness of such developments. Nevertheless, it does seem, today, that there are many opportunities to do deeply consequential sociological and anthropological work with, and through, bioscientific knowledge and practice. And perhaps this should not be surprising. No matter the hyperspecialization of contemporary scholarship, with its sharp policing of disciplinary boundaries (an actuality partly concealed by rhetorics of âinterdisciplinarityâ), human life remains stubbornly biosocial through and through. Whether it is the disproportionate distribution of certain diseases in lower socio-economic groups (Marmot 2010), or the visceral reactions that hate speech may provoke (Zembylas 2007); whether it is the way in which socio-economic and scientific activity modifies bacterial life (Landecker 2016) or gets physically recorded into the outer environment, or in genomic expression; whether it is the way in which normative views of gender, class, and race imbue the materiality of scientific findings with meaning and thereby transform them (Haraway 1989); or the way in which political forms and institutions affect how bacterial diseases take form and circulate (Nading 2012), few central objects of either the social or biological sciences today can be understood other than with complex biosocial, biocultural, or biohistorical rubrics.
The aims of this Handbook are twofold. First, to demarcate an epistemic space in the relationship between the life sciences and the social sciences. This space stands orthogonally to previous sociobiology-biosociety debates, especially those that took shape in the last quarter of the last century. Thus, we were exhorted either to pit the biological against and before the social (sociobiology, evolutionary psychology), or to promote the social against and above the biological. This Handbook aims to undermine this symmetrical hostility. In so doing, we donât want to oversimplify the complex and disparate (if interdependent) matrices of method, theory, and knowledge at stake on both sides of these dividesânor indeed to gloss the dense networks of power and status in which they are enmeshed. While perhaps these contributions are only first steps, the biosocial that emerges from this assemblage of 38 chapters, at least, no longer depends upon an original separation of biological and social forces, organism and environment, agent and milieu, that have then to be awkwardly recomposed in a secondary, additional moment (see Fitzgerald and Callard 2015, reprinted here as Chap. 19).
This has clear implications for knowledge production. In part, this is because the entanglements our contributors identify challenge the neat separation between content and context that favours âentrenched ways of conceiving causation and agencyâ (Alder 2013, 97) wherein humans are conceived largely independently of their circumstances. But it is also because these entanglements go well beyond now-established social constructionist claims that biological knowledge is shaped by meaning, power, and norms. Rather, biological matter itself, be it genomes, brains, diseases, or viruses, is simultaneously irremediably social, not only in its form but also in its content. And vice versa: the very fabric of sociality is always enabled, mediated, and modulated by fleshy substratesâbe they genetic or epigenetic, nutritional, metabolic, hormonal, behavioral, or toxicological. At all levels, the biological and the social are in one another.
Our second aim is to a...