Yet when these problems tend to come in the same clusters repeatedly, it should make us ask questions about the categories that make them appear as separate conditions. From a broader perspective, trauma and related problems thrive in particular social, economic and historical conditions, and their rapid spread may, indeed, be seen as syndemic (Singer 2009; Singer and Clair 2003) at the population level. Where a biomedical perspective on PTSD foregrounds the damage to the individual (biological) brain during traumatic events and regards other factors (such as alcoholism) merely as ‘triggers’ or consequences of disease, a syndemic perspective enables a synergetic view of biosocial interaction, which does not reduce or range factors and consequences as biological or social. This perspective on biosocial becoming involving many different kinds and levels of influences obviously has consequences for how health problems related to legacies of violence are dealt with.
Beyond determinism
Biosocial worlds, therefore, are created in the engagement with the human condition more broadly, as described in this volume, and they are co-created by these descriptions, either as propositions or as critiques. Building on Lock (this volume), we have suggested that the tendency in biology to downscale the environment to something that is experimentally practical is a threat to the understanding of biosocial dynamics. Here, biology may learn from anthropology.
However, this raises the problem of scale and how to work across very different scales of experience. In their common forms of knowledge production, biology has access to knowledge at scales that are usually inaccessible to anthropology, whereas anthropology has access to theoretical understanding of social complexities that are inaccessible to biology. This anthropological contribution points to the need for developing an analytics of biosocial complexity that may very well come at the cost of some of the taxonomical neatness that has been a founding principle of biology, and therefore of biomedicine.
How is it possible to pursue this agenda in shared spaces of exploration and interdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology, biology and medicine? Many cases presented in this volume indicate – and critically challenge – such spaces, whether they be laboratories or clinical spaces (Svendsen; Niewöhner; Livingston); biosocial spaces where the microscopic may be integrated in anthropological analysis (Young; Seeberg); or the broader exploration of the effects of tensions between biologically grounded categories and biosocial complexities (Lock; Napier; Meinert and Whyte; Petryna).
Clearly, the degree of proximity matters. The closer the collaboration, the greater the need for scientists to find mutually agreeable entry points for interdisciplinary dialogue and exploration. We suggest that the focus on scale may be a useful entry point, not for a backward-looking re-enactment of disciplinary boundaries within neatly carved ‘scalar’ principles, but as a point of fruitful exploration of such boundaries with the intention of challenging and reshaping them, accepting that scale and scalability are also political and moral spaces, and that the ‘non-scalable’ (Tsing 2015) should not be lost from analysis.
Doing so may open spaces for the larger issues of complex synergies between biosocial entities otherwise too often conceptualised as distinct, as well as the definition of environment, which in anthropology is closely related to the fluid engagement with the concept of context. Our book requires a move beyond the Darwinist luggage of adaptive evolution that has provided not only the core of biological determinism up to its human genomic climax, but has also spilled over into many other domains, as shown in this volume.
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Singer, M. and
