Sustaining (Dis)Embodied Inequalities in the(ir) Eurocene - Ancient Microbes, Racial Anthropometry, and Life Choices

Coll de Lima Hutchison & Andrea Núñez Casal
Bringing together ethnographic research with Mbya Guarani communities from Argentina’s Atlantic Forest and data from a microbiome expedition to the Amazonian human and non-human communities this paper argues that Indigenous people have been viewed as potential reservoirs for novel probiotics and proposes that we must challenge the racialised and colonial histories of life and geological sciences where such practices continue to be reproduced.
Coll de Lima Hutchison is a researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM, London), currently writing about microbes, their associated human and other hosts, particularly those persons ‘fighting’ against antimicrobial resistance and viral invasions or searching for probiotic salvation. He is also exploring challenges of health governance and socioecological transformation beyond state and market actors. He is a founding member of Kṣobha; a small collective, fermenting ideas to nourish and support possibilities of greater personal, collective, embodied care and more-than-human healing. Andrea Núñez Casal is a researcher at the Department of Science, Technology and Society in the Institute of Philosophy, Spanish National Research Council (IFS-CSIC) and at the Department of Philosophy and Anthropology at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (USC), Spain. Herresearch examines the entanglements between microbes, embodiment and inequalities. To date, her research has centred on the socio-cultural aspects of the human microbiome and immunology, and feminist embodied approaches and decolonial methods to address and remedy inequalities associated with AMR and chronic/recurrent infections. Her current multi-sited research studies the relationalities of gender, microbial biodiversity, and local health cultures as key to reveal the transgenerational knowledges-practices and embodied experiences of healing and their subsequent imprint on contemporary biomedicine.

Learning points

Scholar of various areas have suggested different terms to describe the large number of changes perceived in the social and natural world as we know it nowadays. Each one of these terms are oriented by different paradigms.
  • What are the main differences between the concepts of “Anthropocene”, “Eurocene”, “Plantationcene”, “Capitalocene”?
  • What are the implications of adopting one or the other to address the changes in the social and natural world?