All human life unfolds within a matrix of relations, which are at once social and biological. Yet the study of humanity has long been divided between often incompatible 'social' and 'biological' approaches. Reaching beyond the dualisms of nature and society and of biology and culture, this volume proposes a unique and integrated view of anthropology and the life sciences. Featuring contributions from leading anthropologists, it explores human life as a process of 'becoming' rather than 'being', and demonstrates that humanity is neither given in the nature of our species nor acquired through culture but forged in the process of life itself. Combining wide-ranging theoretical argument with in-depth discussion of material from recent or ongoing field research, the chapters demonstrate how contemporary anthropology can move forward in tandem with groundbreaking discoveries in the biological sciences.
Preface; 1. Prospect Tim Ingold; 2. Ensembles of biosocial relations Gisli Palsson; 3. Blurring the biological and social in human becomings Agustin Fuentes; 4. Life-in-the-making: epigenesis, biocultural environments and human becomings Eugenia Ramirez-Goicoechea; 5. Thalassemic lives as stories of becoming: mediated biologies and genetic (un)certainties Aglaia Chatjouli; 6. Shedding our selves: perspectivism, the bounded subject and the nature-culture divide Noa Vaisman; 7. Reflections on a collective brain at work: one week in the working life of an NGO-team in urban Marocco Barbara Elisabeth Götsch; 8. The habits of water: marginality and the sacralization of non-humans in North-Eastern Ghana Gaetano Mangiameli; 9. 'Bringing wood to life': lines, flows and materials in a Swazi sawmill Vito Laterza, Bob Forrester and Patience Mususa; 10. Humanity and life as the perpetual maintenance of specific efforts: a reappraisal of animism Istvan Praet; 11. Ravelling/unravelling: being-in-the-world and falling-out-of-the-world Hayder Al-Mohammad; 12. Retrospect Gisli Palsson; Notes on the contributors; References; Index.
