Biosocial Worlds offers state-of-the-art contributions to anthropological reflections on the porous boundaries between human and nonhuman life—the biosocial worlds. Based on changing understandings of the natural and the social, the book explores what it means to be human in these worlds, even as the division between scientific disciplines has, for more than a century, maintained a separation of the natural and the social. Drawing on examples from Botswana, Denmark, Mexico, the Netherlands, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the volume argues against the separation of the biological and the social in the study of human and nonhuman life and seeks to unfold the consequences of their discursive separation with the aim of rethinking “the biosocial”.
 
Health topics in the book include diabetes, trauma, cancer, HIV, tuberculosis, prevention of neonatal disease, and wider issues of epigenetics. In addition, the book addresses constructions of health and disease in a wide range of environments and engages with analyses of the concept of environment. Anthropological reflection and ethnographic case studies, meanwhile, explore how health and environment are entangled in ways that moves their relation beyond interdependence to one of inseparability.
 

Jens Seeberg, Andreas Roepstorff, and Lotte Meinert are all professors of anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark.
 

Introduction: Biosocial Worlds Jens Seeberg, Andreas Roepstorff and Lotte Meinert  1. Permeable Bodies and Environmental Delineation Margaret Lock 2. Situating Biologies. Studying Differentiation as Material-Semiotic Practice Jörg Niewöhner 3. Pig-Human Relations in Neonatology: Knowing and Unknowing in a Multi-Species Collaborative Mette N. Svendsen 4. Anthropology’s End to Biodeterminism: A New Sociobiology A. David Napier 5. Tribes Without Rulers: Bacteria Life In The Human Holobiont Allan Young 6.  Biosocial Dynamics of Multi-Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis: a Bacterial Perspective Jens Seeberg 7. When Sickness Comes in Multiples: Co-morbidity in Botswana Julie Livingston 8. Legacies of Violence: The Communicability of Spirits and Trauma in Northern Uganda Lotte Meinert and Susan Reynolds Whyte: 9. What Is a Horizon? Extinction and Time amid Climate Change Adriana Petryna Afterword: Getting Closer? Anna Tsing Index