Local Biologies

In her 1993 comparative study of the experience, symptoms, and meanings of menopause in Japan and North America, anthropologist Margaret Lock used “local biologies” as a concept to capture “the ongoing dialectic between biology and culture in which both are contingent.” Lock’s findings were innovative. She was not so much highlighting that language, or even different moral systems, shape or construct different experiences of disease. Nor was she merely shifting biology into the symbolic (as, for instance, in the parallel usage of local biologies by anthropologist Atwood Gaines—see Gaines 1992, Gaines 1995, cited under Establishing the Concept of Local Biologies). Lock, more ambitiously, argued that there are some actual embodied differences in the experiences of aging between Japanese and North American women, possibly in response to the way normative discourses (emotions, interpretations) or local physical factors (diet, stress, pollution) are differently incorporated into their minds, brains, and bodies. As Bieler and Niewöhner 2018 (under Establishing the Concept of Local Biologies) notes, in Lock’s ethnographic work, she “noticed striking differences in the way ‘menopause’ was experienced by Japanese women compared to women in North America,” and, “most obvious, perhaps, was the absence of ‘hot flashes’ as a symptom of hormonal changes so regularly reported by North American women. Rather than reducing this differential experience to either culture (different discourse) or nature (different bodies), Lock weaves a thick ethnographic narrative that . . . draws together differences in media reporting and public discourse, women’s accounts of experiences, body images and genealogies of ‘aging’ narratives within a broader analysis of cultural and political context, including the role of the medical system. The result is not so much an explanation of cross-cultural differences in individual bodily experience but rather an ethnographic account of the diversity and contingency of female aging.” Lock’s move challenged the mainstream debate of the time, caught as it was between the abstract and universalizing body of biomedicine (bodies are biologically the same regardless of time and space) and a certain understanding of social constructionism that made material bodies disappear in the web of signs, meaning, and language with little or no attention paid to their embodied and ecological dimensions. “Local biologies” was then introduced to capture how human experience does not sit well within the polarized opposition of biology and culture, nature and nurture, local and universal, natural or historical. The different lifestyles or diets that Lock analyzed between Japan and North America are a good example of this crisscrossing of biocultural binaries, as they both impacted differences in symptom reporting and actual longevity, according to the analysis of Lock and Kaufert 2001 (under Establishing the Concept of Local Biologies). To account for this dialectic of biology and culture is not enough to resort to the usual network of meanings and norms, discourses and narratives rooted in knowledge/power. One needs to move further, at the intersection of ecological, social and embodied factors, to reach that often hidden or silenced agential power of things - the level of sugar in the blood, the quality of breathed air, the availability of fresh food, or (today) the microbiota within human tissues - that make the “experience” of the body possible in certain ways rather than others. As Lock 2001 (under Establishing the Concept of Local Biologies) again claimed, this means the assumption of a universal biological body upon which sociocultural variations are added like layers is a fiction. The concept of local bodies, instead, asks us to look at the contingent and contextual production of culturally intelligent bodies and embodied cultures. Finally, it is important to notice that, more recently, Niewöhner and Lock 2018 (under Establishing the Concept of Local Biologies) moved the concept of local biologies to that of situated biologies to capture all the processes that shape embodiment and environment/human entanglement “in a time when displacement and disruptions among human groups” are increasingly determined by global phenomena, including migrations and climate change. In conclusion, beyond anthropology, Lock’s move has to be understood as happening at the juncture of a major shift in social science and social theory after the polarizing debates of biology vs. social explanations in sociobiology first and evolutionary psychology later. On one side, evolutionary theory increasingly emphasized the entanglement of biological and environmental factors. This is the case for instance of evolutionary philosopher Susan Oyama and colleagues in the so-called developmental systems theory that challenged the notion that biology exists before the social as a universal and timeless substrate to human activities (see Oyama, et al. 2003, under Establishing the Concept of Local Biologies). Oyama and colleagues also aimed to entangle biology with its material network of environmental contexts, from the cellular to the wider ecological level, rather than taking for granted that biology is immutable or less contextual than cultural factors. Lock 1993 (under Establishing the Concept of Local Biologies) and Oyama and colleagues’ moves were not the same, but both concurred to think biology and the environment or culture are not in a causally hierarchical relation but on the same causal or ontological ground. While biology was being increasingly understood as a porous and dynamic matter, always contingent and marked by developmental time, rather than mere genetic sequences, a significant group of social theorists were questioning some of the binaries of language and matter, experience and embodiment, that they saw typical of past social constructionist approaches. Coole and Frost 2010 (under Establishing the Concept of Local Biologies) is well representative of this wide shift across the social sciences and (post)humanities that aims at re-engaging with matter as always and inextricably imbued with meaning and agency. This new positioning within theory (exemplified by the work of other authors, such as Karen Barad, Anne Fausto Sterling, Liz Wilson, or Sam Frost, to name a few) offers a significant conceptual companion for the work of anthropologists like Lock and colleagues.