Tim Ingold, Gísli Pálsson, eds, 2013, <em>Biosocial Becomings: Integrating biological and social anthropology</em>, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 281
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-157
Recensione di Tim Ingold, Gísli Pálsson, eds, 2013, Biosocial Becomings: Integrating biological and social anthropology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 281.
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Tim Ingold, Gísli Pálsson, eds, 2013, <em>Biosocial Becomings: Integrating biological and social anthropology</em>, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 281
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Shé Mackenzie Hawke
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Tim Ingold, Gísli Pálsson, eds, 2013, <em>Biosocial Becomings: Integrating biological and social anthropology</em>, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 281
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Tim Ingold and Gísli Palsson (Eds.), 2013, Biosocial Becomings: Integrating biological
and social anthropology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 281.


Old beings new becomings: Neo-Darwinism and Descartes dualisms are dead–again!

        Biosocial Becomings advances the integration of the “two radically separated
subfields of biological-physical and social-cultural anthropology” (p. vii), dissolving
tensions between gene and meme theory and avoiding the colonisation of one over the other.
The contributors explore how the study of life could be extended, by rejecting past dualisms
and assuming worlds of becoming rather than being.
        Fields such as cultural studies, psychology, and sociology have wrestled long with the
questions of becoming and being, and the dissolution of Descartian dualisms by mapping the
space between the bio-nature/socio-culture binary. What editors Ingold and Palsson present in
this collection, is a substantive and diverse account of concerns in the current state of play in
twenty-first century anthropology, and related fields. As Ingold‟s opening says, “The scale of
re-thinking we are calling for here can scarcely be overestimated” (p. 9), human becoming is
contingent on “laying the Cartesian dualism finally to rest” (p. 88). Yet, Ingold seems
somewhat unaware that other disciplinary streams have previously declared dualisms dead,
such as French post structuralism, Latour (Bruno Latour, 1993, We Have Never Been
Modern, Cambridge and Massachusetts, Harvard University Press), and Haraway‟s (Donna
Haraway, 2003, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness,
Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press) work on nature/cultures. Perhaps combined disciplinary
pronouncements of the death of the dualism may indeed render it an archaic motif and enable
the integration of anthropology and its trans-disciplinary affiliates, to grow this work.
        The concepts of becomings, biosociality, and multiple agency have garnered active
epistemological reflection across fields, provoking a genuine shift in approach from the
natural selection ideals of traditional anthropology. Yet it is natural enough for the neo
Darwinian paradigm to act as a referent to the disruption of traditional anthropological
theory. As Ingold‟s opening proclaims: “Neo-Darwinism is dead” (p. 1). He calls for radical
re-visioning of the Darwinian legacy and biosocial future, wondering: “If only we … could
open up a new synthesis in the study of biosocial relations” (p. 14), that Palsson calls a
“rhizomatic notion of relations” (p. 29). Here perhaps is the core of the project: to create a
new paradigm, predicated on the “simple structure, complex process” approach (p. 17).
        From Götsch‟s “Reflections on a Collective Brain at Work” (Chapter 7) to Praet‟s
“Humanity and Life as the Perpetual Maintenance of Specific Efforts: a reappraisal of
animism” (Chapter 10), the collection does not disappoint. Laterza, Forrester and Mususa
bring the embodied life of wood and its biosocial networks to new meaning in “Lines, Flows
and Materials in a Swazi sawmill” (Chapter 9). The authors favour “a perceptual engagement
with life that privileges flow, flux and process grounded in the constant production,
transformation and dissolution of materials” (p. 163), associated with real movements “as
endogenous to meshwork” (p. 167) of productive life. Chapter 11 “Being-in-the-world and
Falling-out-of-the world” by Al-Mohammad presents a philosophical approach through a re-
reading of Heidegger and teasing apart being-in-the-world-ness along with evolving dualisms
into confluences. The ethnographic case studies in these chapters demonstrate a decisive
move towards fluid becoming, and a conceptual return to Anaximander‟s original iteration of
the dualisms as an indefinite continuum of complementary motion (aiperon).
        Chatjouli‟s sensitive yet radical attempt to “problematize and historicize biology” (p.
88) in “Thalassaemic Lives as Stories of Becoming” (Chapter 5) is disquieting in terms of
epigenetic effects of biomedical interventions, through an examination “the embodiment of

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transfusions” (p. 90). Cutting across the Australia turn to the ecological humanities, are the
compelling chapters from Palsson (Chapters 2 and 11), Fuentes (Chapter 3), Ramirez-
Goicoechea (Chapter 4) Vaisman (Chapter 6) and Mangiameli (Chapter 8).
         In “Ensembles of Biosocial Relations” (Chapter 2), Palsson affirms that: “Human
becoming is a thoroughly relational, biosocial phenomenon, collective history embodied and
endlessly refashioned in the habitus” (p. 40). He provides a tidy history of ideas on ensembles
and biosocial becomings that cross-examines the nature/culture divide. Palsson‟s epigenetic
Foreword and Retrospect, and Ramirez-Goicoechea‟s “Life-in-the-making: epigenesist,
biocultural environments and human becomings” (Chapter 4) actively dissolve lines that
separate the sociocultural from the biophysical, and re-iterate the propositions of the
collection with the specificity of epigenetic inquiry.
         Ramirez-Goicoechea views the epigenetic scenario as a convergence of agents and
environments. Echoing Ingold‟s propositions about niche construction, unfolding and
enfolding, she suggests: “Engineering their environments through niche construction,
organisms become agents of change for themselves and for others” (p. 70). The territory
surveyed here is compelling. However, the spectre of eugenic perfectionism haunts
epigenetic research and this chapter warns of possible new marginal subjectivities, ever
cognizant of the “biopsycho-sociocultural and political framework”, of life “in-the-making”
(p. 81).
Fuentes (Chapter 3) “Blurring the Biological and Social in Human Becomings” also tussles
with Odling-Smee‟s (2003) work on “niche construction and multiple inheritance … and
the synergistic interactions between organisms and environments” (p. 49-50) presents the
niche construction approach as unified rather than separated as discrete spheres (p. 50),
thereby untangling notions of fixed determinism. Niche construction and the biosocial, echo
Mauss‟ (Marcel Mauss, 1979 [1934], “Body Techniques”, in Sociology and Psychology:
essays, translated by Ben Brewster, London, Routledge) treatise on the inter-relatedness of
the biological, social and psychological from his essay “Techniques of the Body”, later
inherited by Bourdieu, 1 whose concept of habitus, field and agency is here, given new life.
Palsson‟s research here and prior is particularly worthy.
         Vaisman‟s “Perspectivism, the Bounded Subject and the Nature/Culture Divide”
(Chapter 6) navigates the temporo-spatial world of reciprocal relations, ever engaged in a
matrix of unfolding and enfolding. She argues convincingly “that our original point of
reference – the organism as a physically bound entity – may be flawed” (p. 113) and suggests
thinking instead of “organism-human” relations more as an assemblage as the Maussian
corpus of knowledge implies, aligned with Ingold‟s uptake of the complementarity thesis, and
cultural studies concomitant investment in generative confluences, binary dissolution, and
becomings.
         This bleeds into the poetics of Mangiameli (Chapter 8). Entitled “Marginality and the
Sacralization of Non-Humans in North-Eastern Ghana”, it textually renovates Bourdieu‟s
habitus, field and agency. It is a surprising chapter with insightful trans-disciplinary elements
that along with Palsson‟s exploration of epigenetics, does the most exciting work in the
collection. Mangiameli begins with an interpretation of Thoreau‟s poetics and failure to find
the perfect finite text called nature, exploring nature as engaged in a becoming rather than
fixed as a completeness of being. His semiotic approach to the “sacralization of nature” is
suggestive of a textual biosocial poiesis – a generative mingling of ensembles, through which


1
  See Pierre Bourdieu, 1977, Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, for the clear explanation of habitus, field and agency that has recently enjoyed
resurgence in sociology, minority discourse, and cultural studies as well as social anthropology.

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the habits of water and attendant relations become operationalised through ecological
meshworks of inter-related becomings.
        Mangiameli‟s research is produced through observation of the Kasena people, whose
version of “„sacralisation of nature” is embedded “in the unpredictable and multifactorial
process through which the world takes shape… and in which the human is a relevant
component but not the director” (p. 147). This leads Mangiameli to a refracted Bourdieurian
analysis of the abiotic agency of water and its co-relations that while brief, is astute. Through
the queried agency of water, this chapter charts a radical and generative new course.
        Biosocial Becomings reassures current research of the ongoing currency and diverse
application of Mauss and Bourdieu‟s concepts through the biosocial optic, and “distributive
agency” (Palsson, p. 244), that re-imagines creatures of all kinds not “for what they are, but
of what they do” (p. 8). This intersects strongly with recent theoretical work in fields like
Social Archeology and Human Geography that have reconfigured the relationship between
the animate and inanimate as one of “co-producers”. Hail a new paradigm of rich trans-
disciplinary inquiry that champions the biosocial, and the notion of becoming that may lay
the Descartian dualisms finally to rest.



                                                                         Shé Mackenzie Hawke
                                                          Australian National University (ANU)
                                                                        she.hawke@anu.edu.au




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