Enviro-Anthropo-Genesis: The Co-production and Destruction of Bodies of People, Land and Water

Session 3 : Interroger la structuration sociale des inégalités de santé en anthropologie et en épidémiologie

Discussion : Pierre-Yves Geoffard (CNRS)

Résumé

Enviro-Anthropo-Genesis proposes a new way to understand the simultaneous co-production of environments and people on multiple levels. At certain junctures, the environments and people simultaneously destroy one another. Bodies of land and water may be made and unmade by social formations from the aftermaths of colonialism to the racializations of plantation societies, from solution-oriented high-tech food systems to movements for environmental sustainability. Social structures are, in turn, assembled and disassembled by environmental formations from protected waterways that irrigate intensive agriculture to borderlands that solidify racialized hierarchies and national imaginaries, from polluted air and water that intensifies sickness among certain racialized and classed populations to courts and governments approving legal rights to seas and mountains. This broad theoretical framework is being developed in relation to ongoing ethnographic research into transnational industrial food systems and the bodies – of land, water and people – making up their infrastructure. The presentation draws from ongoing research into the health and health care of Indigenous Mexican migrant farmworkers and food supply chain workers in the United States as well as of Latin American, North African and Eastern European migrant farmworkers and food supply chain workers in Western Europe.

Seth Holmes

Seth M. Holmes is a Chanellor's Professor in the UC Berkeley Division of Society and Environment, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, and ICREA Researcher at the Universitat de Barcelona. He is Co-Chair of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Co-Director of the MD/PhD Track in Medical Anthropology coordinated between UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco and Director of the Interinstitutional Hub for Global Social Medicine at Barcelona. A medical anthropologist and physician, Holmes works on social hierarchies, health inequities, and the ways in which such asymmetries are naturalized, normalized, and resisted in contexts of transnational im/migration, agro-food systems, and health care. He has received national and international awards from the fields of anthropology, sociology, geography, and documentary film, including the New Millennium Book Award, the Margaret Mead Award and the Textor Prize. In addition to scholarly publications, he has written for popular media such as The Guardian, The Huffington Post and Salon.com and spoken on multiple NPR, PRI, Pacifica Radio and Radio Bilingüe radio programs.