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More-Than-Human Eating

Reconfiguring Environment|Body|Mind Relations in the Anthropocene

Authors

  • Anna Heitger IRI THESys
  • Sabine Biedermann
  • Jörg Niewöhner

Keywords:

More-than-Human, Eating Body, Microbiome, Food Security, Anticipation

Abstract

This paper is concerned with emergent more-than-human eating practices and how they might challenge received understandings of bio- and geopolitics.After a brief review of the anthropology of food and eating and how its concerns may have to be expanded in the Anthropocene, we briefly analyse three empirical cases of anticipatory more-than-human eating practices: a set of artistic anticipations of future eating; microbiome research and related biohacking practices; and research on future food security in the context of planetary boundaries. We discuss how all three cases make the boundaries between body|mind|environment porous. The ‘I’ of the embodied human subject emerges as multiple – colonised and accompanied by a panoply of microorganisms. How might such a collective be subject to governance and ‘self’-technologies? We close by pleading for an experimental para-sitic anthropology that critically addresses emergent forms of bio/geopolitics in the Anthropocene.

Author Biographies

Anna Heitger, IRI THESys

Anna Heitger is pursuing her PhD at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research is located within the BMBF Project “Food for Future” that aims at generating a new approach to future food and eating. Within this consortium, Anna’s effort is to both conduct laboratory research within the partner projects to facilitate an understanding of the assumptions and implications of such anticipatory research practices, and conduct research outside the consortium in a variety of field sites to establish an ethnographic analysis of divergent approaches to food, the future of food, and eating practices of the present. With her research situating eating as a more-than-human practice at the very interface between human and environment, she hopes to explore the future(s) emergent from these particular anticipations of food.

Sabine Biedermann

Sabine Biedermann is a doctoral candidate at the graduate school “innovation society today” at TU Berlin. She holds a diploma in Sociology from the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago de Chile and a master's degree in European Ethnology from the Humboldt University Berlin. Her PhD research deals with the question of how a “healthy” human microbiome is enacted in everyday practices, and how scientific and lay communities work with the microbiota and intervene in it, focusing on human-bacterial collaborations towards health and well being. With her research she intends to follow the now long-standing tradition of science and technology studies ethnographic inquiries and direct her attention to non-human agency, relations, and practices.

Jörg Niewöhner

Jörg Niewöhner heads the Laboratory: Anthropology of Environment|Human Relations at the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and serves as the director of the Integrative Research Centre: Transformation of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys). His ethnographic research deals with ecological analytics in anthropology, particularly in the fields of global environmental change and urban mental health.

Titelbild Ecological Ontologies

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Published

21. June 2021

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How to Cite

Heitger, A., Biedermann, S., & Niewöhner, J. (2021). More-Than-Human Eating: Reconfiguring Environment|Body|Mind Relations in the Anthropocene. Berliner Blätter, 84, 35–48. Retrieved from http://www.berliner-blaetter.de/index.php/blaetter/article/view/1104

Issue

Vol. 84 (2021): Ecological Ontologies - Approaching Human-Environmental Engagements

Section

Artikel

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Copyright (c) 2021 Berliner Blätter

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