Maurizio Meloni

The cleanliness, mobility and quality of urban air has regained political legibility in debates on post-pandemic cities. To contextualize the political and epistemological significance of air in urban contexts, we suggest looking at the under-researched experience of premodern cities and bodies, how they developed a complex ecological imagination and solutions guided by findings from Hippocratic-Galenic medicine. While we do not romanticize these efforts, we argue that they represent
an overlooked archive through which the post-Enlightenment mechanization, securitization and abstraction of air can be challenged. Turning to recent findings from both more-than-human thinking
and microbiology as applied to air (aerobiome), we acknowledge that microbiome science is a result of laboratory science; however, we argue that findings from microbiome science point to a reanimation of air as something that cannot be fully instrumentalized or securitized as in modernistic programs of biopolitical control. By drawing on the on the experience of the Hippocratic tradition as a catalyst and a proxy for wider ontologies of flows and corporeal porosity across the Eurasian landmass, we suggest arriving at an affirmative reconceptualization of human-environment entanglement based on notions of permeability and a non-binary ontology of flows. This more-than human approach may not only complicate the alleged simplistic view of the “West” as a dualistic
monolith but act also as bridge and companion to Indigenous and Southern ontologies and experiences of life, non-life, matter and nature. Key Words: aerobiome, cities, Covid-19, Hippocratic
tradition, relational ontologies

To contextualise present biomedical debates on the role of pregnancy in shaping offspring traits, and hence the related notion of maternal responsibility, we review in this chapter the prehistory of the belief in maternal impression. Maternal impression is the enduring notion that the emotions and experiences of a pregnant woman could leave permanent marks on her unborn child. We are not claiming in the following pages that maternal impression, or its historical understanding, is a direct predecessor of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). However, with this global historical overview moving eastward from the Mediterranean to Asian medical systems, we are alerting the reader to the ubiquitous pre-scientific concern with pregnancy, and sometimes prepregnancy, as a key time ‘requiring self-discipline and work on the part of expectant mothers’ [1]. As DOHaD globalises its research and claims about novel forms of soft inheritance [2] to geographical regions that encompass a multiplicity of knowledge systems, this longue durée and global view of maternal effects may help understand both
its resonance with traditional beliefs in the West and contemporary forms of hybridisation with non-Western systems of medical knowledge, which we will discuss in Section 1.4.

Personalised nutrition (PN) has emerged over the past twenty years as a promising area of research in the postgenomic era and has been popularized as the new big thing out of molecular biology. Advocates of PN claim that previous approaches to nutrition sought general and universal guidance that applied to all people. In contrast, they contend that PN operates with the principle that "one size does not fit all" when it comes to dietary guidance. While the molecular mechanisms studied within PN are new, the notion of a personal dietary regime guided by medical advice has a much longer history that can be traced back to Galen's "On Food and Diet" or Ibn Sina's (westernized as Avicenna) "Canon of Medicine". Yet this history is either wholly ignored or misleadingly appropriated by PN proponents. This (mis)use of history, we argue helps to sustain the hype of the novelty of the proposed field and potential commodification of molecular advice that undermines longer histories of food management in premodern and non-Western cultures. Moreover, it elides how the longer history of nutritional advice always happened in a heavily moralized, gendered, and racialized context deeply entwined with collective technologies of power, not just individual advice. This article aims at offering a wider appreciation of this longer history to nuance the hype and exceptionalism surrounding contemporary claims.

Recent controversies surrounding Michel Foucault suggest tensions and unresolved issues in his unfinished work. Here we interrogate Foucault's legacy in relation to his claim that the welfare-state is a secularization of the Christian pastorate. We challenge Foucault's binary narrative of the Christian flock vs. the Graeco-Roman citizen and expand the focus to other "technologies of power" in Medieval Islam. Rather than an outburst of governmentality in modernity, we suggest a longue-durée history of which the Christian pastorate was merely one facet. This non-binary framework indicates that Foucault's claim of a "demonic" fusion of sovereign and pastoral power in modern politics requires significant revisitation. Finally, we claim that Foucault's much-discussed fascination with neoliberalism may have roots in this one-sided narrative regarding the birth of the welfare-state.

In this essay we take stock of the shortcomings, successes,
and promises of ‘biopolitics’ to understand and frame global
health crises such as COVID-19. We claim that rather than thinking
in terms of a special relationship between Western modernity
and biopolitics, it is better to look at a longer and more global
history of populations’ politics of life and health to situate present
and future responses to ecological crises. Normatively, we argue
for an affirmative biopolitics, that at once de-securitizes current
approaches to our biosocial condition and expands the politics of
the human estate to other molar and molecular dimensions.

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/887041

The pandemic has produced an explosion of reference to the Foucauldian paradigm of biopolitics with ubiquitous claims that we are living through a truly ‘Foucauldian moment’ (Cot, Le Monde, 2020; Esposito, La Repubblica, 2020). Parallel analyses of the ‘exceptionality’ of the present moment and comparisons to emergency decisions during the totalitarian experiences of the twentieth century (Agamben 2020, 2021) exhibit a similar tendency to think the current crisis only through modern or presentistic eyes. However, pandemics, and their management, long preexist the modern state and the supposed uniqueness of the modern biopolitical constitution. Observing during the pandemic the perturbing return of material artifacts and social technologies that from quarantine to social distancing, from health passport to sanitation of objects and environments, disrupt any easy premodern-modern dichotomy, this chapter suggests a longue durée view of biopolitics to place the present crisis into a more granular context. Even though key biopolitical thinkers tend to cut off modern politics and its crises from a longer and more global view, human history is biosocial and biopolitical through and through. This approach challenges modernism as a form of chronological ethnocentrism that ultimately reproduces a convenient view of the past for the sake of promoting the exceptionality of the present and the role of its critics.

Foucault's argument that a major break occurred in the nature of power in the European Eighteenth century-an unprecedented socialization of medicine and concern for the health of bodies and populations, the birth of biopolitics-has become since the 1990s a dominant narrative among sociologists but is rarely if ever scrutinized in its premises. This article problematizes Foucault's periodization about the politics of health and the way its story has been solidified into an uncritical account. Building on novel historiographic work, it challenges the modernist bias of histories of biopolitics and public health and considers an earlier and more plural history of collective practices of health of which the story told by Foucault is just one important episode. Finally, it discusses the implications of this revised model for wider sociological debates on the link between modernity, health and the body.

Our understanding of body–world relations is caught in a curious contradiction. On one side, it is well established that many concepts that describe interaction with the outer world – ‘plasticity’ or ‘metabolism’- or external influences on the body - ‘environment’ or ‘milieu’ – appeared with the rise of modern science. On the other side, although premodern science lacked a unifying term for it, an anxious attentiveness to the power of ‘environmental factors’ in shaping physical and moral traits held sway in nearly all medical systems before and alongside modern Europe. In this article, I build on a new historiography on the policing of bodies and environments in medieval times and at the urban scale to problematize Foucault’s claim about biopolitics as a modern phenomenon born in the European eighteenth-century. I look in particular at the collective usage of ancient medicine and manipulation of the milieu based on humoralist notions of corporeal permeability (Hippocrates, Galen, Ibn Sīnā) in the Islamicate and Latin Christendom between the 12th and the 15th century. This longer history has implications also for a richer genealogy of contemporary tropes of plasticity, permeability and environmental determinism beyond usual genealogies that take as a starting point the making of the modern body and EuroAmerican biomedicine.

Epigenetics stands in a complex relationship to issues of sex and gender. As a scientific field, it has been heavily criticized for disproportionately targeting the maternal body and reproducing deterministic views of biological sex (Kenney and Müller, 2017; Lappé, 2018; Richardson et al., 2014). And yet, it also represents the culmination of a long tradition of engaging with developmental biology as a feminist cause, because of the dispersal of the supposed ‘master code’ of DNA among wider cellular, organismic and ecological contexts (Keller, 1988). In this paper, we explore a number of tensions at the intersection of sex, gender and trauma that are playing out in the emerging area of neuroepigenetics - a relatively new subfield of epigenetics specifically interested in environment-brain relations through epigenetic modifications in neurons. Using qualitative interviews with leading scientists, we explore how trauma is conceptualized in neuroepigenetics, paying attention to its gendered dimensions. We address a number of concerns raised by feminist STS researchers in regard to epigenetics, and illustrate why we believe close engagement with neuroepigenetic claims, and neuroepigenetic researchers themselves, is a crucial step for social scientists interested in questions of embodiment and trauma. We argue this for three reasons: (1) Neuroepigenetic studies are recognizing the agential capacities of biological materials such as genes, neurotransmitters and methyl groups, and how they influence memory formation; (2) Neuroepigenetic conceptions of trauma are yet to be robustly coupled with social and anthropological theories of violence (Eliot, 2021; Nelson, 2021; Walby, 2013); (3) In spite of the gendered assumptions we find in neuroepigenetics, there are fruitful spaces – through collaboration – to be conceptualizing gender beyond culture-biology and nature-nurture binaries (Lock and Nguyen, 2010). To borrow Gravlee’s (2009: 51) phrase, we find reason for social scientists to consider how gender is not only constructed, but how it may “become biology” via epigenetic and other biological pathways. Ultimately, we argue that a robust epigenetic methodology is one which values the integrity of expertise outside its own field, and can have an open, not  empty mind to cross-disciplinary dialogue

This project aims to investigate how the science of epigenetics – the regulation and expression of genes - is reshaping notions of the body, heredity and biological plasticity in the Global South. Using case studies in Australia, India and South Africa, and referring more widely to other Southern countries in Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Pacific, it will offer a comparative understanding of how bodies are made permeable, and thus available for intervention, across different sites in the Global South. Integrating approaches from Science and Technology Studies, social theory, history of medicine and biopolitics, this project will track how epigenetic ideas are shaped by, and contribute to shaping, local scientific cultures in Australia, South Africa and India, and their material and social implications for the governance of bodies and populations.

In this paper, I analyze the disruptive impact of Darwinian selectionism for the century-long tradition in which the environment had a direct causative role in shaping an organism's traits. In the case of humans, the surrounding environment often determined not only the physical, but also the mental and moral features of individuals and whole populations. With its apparatus of indirect effects, random variations, and a much less harmonious view of nature and adaptation, Darwinian selectionism severed the deep imbrication of organism and milieu posited by these traditional environmentalist models. This move had radical implications well beyond strictly biological debates. In my essay, I discuss the problematization of the moral idiom of environmentalism by William James and August Weismann who adopted a selectionist view of the development of mental faculties. These debates show the complex moral discourse associated with the environmentalist-selectionist dilemma. They also well illustrate how the moral reverberations of selectionism went well beyond the stereotyped associations with biological fatalism or passivity of the organism. Rereading them today may be helpful as a genealogical guide to the complex ethical quandaries unfolding in the current postgenomic scenario in which a revival of new environmentalist themes is taking place.

Living in postgenomic times: Of imprinting and plasticity.
This chapter explores the fundamental ambiguity of the concept of plasticity – between openness and determination, change and stabilization of forms. This pluralism of meanings is used to unpack different instantiations of corporeal plasticity across various epochs, starting from ancient and early modern medicine, particularly humouralism. A genealogical approach displaces the notion that plasticity is a unitary phenomenon, coming in the abstract, and illuminates the unequal distribution of different forms of plasticities across social, gender, and ethnic groups. Taking a longer view of the plastic body as a ubiquitous belief in traditions predating and coexisting with modern medicine will help contextualize the seeming radicalism of today’s turn to permeability and the exceptionalism of Western findings. By highlighting the complex biopolitical usages of plasticity in the past, the chapter warns against simplistic appropriations of the term in contemporary body/world configurations driven by findings in neuroscience, epigenetics and microbiomics.

The case for an unprecedented penetration of life mechanisms into the politics of Western modernity has been a cornerstone of twentieth-century social theory. Working with and beyond Foucault, this article challenges established views about the history of biopower by focusing on ancient medical writings and practices of corporeal permeability. Through an analysis of three Roman institutions: a) bathing; b) urban architecture; and c) the military, it shows that technologies aimed at fostering and regulating life did exist in Classical antiquity at the population scale. The article highlights zones of indistinction between natural and political processes, zoē and bíos, that are not captured by a view of destructive incorporation of or over life by sovereign power. In conclusion, the article discusses the theoretical potential of this historical evidence for contemporary debates on 'affirmative biopolitics' and 'environmental biopower'.
Refer to final published version: at:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0263276420923727

Text presented at the Metabolism(s) Roundtable (Deakin University, ADI stream Culture Environment and Science, Melbourne, 15 August 2019) and published in final version in Somatosphere in Jan 2020, for the series “Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Refractions”.
"According to accepted wisdom and textbooks, 'metabolism' is a nineteenth-century term and concept, established at the confluence of organic chemistry, cell biology, and physiology. In Microscopical Researches (1839), Schwann spoke of the 'metabolic phenomena of the cells,' using for the first time the adjective metabolische, from which 'metabolic' entered the English language in the 1847 translation (Bing 1971). This standard (....)

This chapter offers a sociological interpretation of the postgenomic landscape along three axes: a) shifts in notions of responsibility from genetics to epigenetics (particularly around reproduction) and implications for a new moralized attention to parental lifestyles; b) emerging notions of biolegitimacy and “molecular suffering” driven by epigenetics and connected to demand for social justice and reparation, especially in postcolonial areas; and c) the ethics of postgenomic plasticity as an alternative to modernistic and postmodernist appropriation of biological plasticity, one that promotes notions of biological finitude and radical situatedness.
The convergence of these three axes in outlining an emerging postgenomic landscape illustrates the importance to update the sociology of genetics (and more largely of health) to include these novel areas of contention. A new sociology of postgenomics should address in an innovative way long- standing debates in biology and society on what is innate and what is acquired, nature and nurture. An analysis of these shifting boundaries in body-world configurations has important implications for notions of risk, responsibility, vulnerability and intervention.

Michel Foucault has left us a number of memorable sentences, many of which are known literally by heart by at least two generations of social scientists. One of the most repeated is his passage on the emergence of biopower as a distinctive trait and a “threshold” of modern politics. In the last chapter of the first volume of his History of Sexuality (original 1976), Foucault famously wrote: “for millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (1978: 143, my emphasis). According to Foucault, modernity is unique in its incorporation of life processes into its strategies, at the level of both body and population. This was done mainly through introducing new technologies of knowledge/power such as sex and race. Were political and ethical strategies really “for millennia” devoid of any interest in the merely physiological aspects of life? Did we need to wait for the emergence of modernity to see “the entry of life into history”  (1978: 141) as an object of calculation and a target of biopolitical control? Other totems of European social theory have contributed to this view (...)

This chapter addresses humoralism as an ontology of the ancient and early
modern body. Although some humoralist frameworks traded in notions of
stability and even fixity, the humoralist body was always marked by a contextual
dependency on time and place that gave it the resources to undermine
or consume this fixity. This is why humoralism appears as the most
visible site to assess the permeability, plasticity and dispersion of ancient
and early modern biological matter. However, with this permeability, a constant
anxiety and policing of bodily boundaries accompanied the politics of
humoralism. Even more significantly, this policing was deeply gendered and
racialized. In the second part of the chapter, I address this unequal distribution
of the “burden of plasticity” toward women and racial groups deemed
at risk of degeneration. Particularly, I explore arguments about maternal
impression (how a gestating mother’s thoughts and emotions could leave a
permanent imprint on her unborn child) and body malleability in women,
seen as being at greater risk of leakage, and therefore subject to more intense
attention and surveillance.

This article sets the stage for a genealogy of the postgenomic body. It starts with the current transformative views of epigenetics and microbiomics to offer a more pluralistic history in which the ethical problem of how to live with a permeable body – that is plasticity as a form of life – is pervasive in traditions pre-dating and coexisting with modern biomedicine (particularly humoralism in its several ramifications). To challenge universalizing narratives, I draw on genealogical method to illuminate the unequal distribution of plasticity across gender and ethnic groups. Finally, after analysing postgenomics as a different thought-style to genomics, I outline some of its implications for notions of plasticity. I argue that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental control of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of endless potentialities. It is instead closer to an alter-modernistic view that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination , individual and community.

Between 1910 and 1930, Europe was the site of a critical debate on the politics of human heredity. The debate featured four main positions, a quadrant of political-epistemological commitments: right and left Mendelism, and right and left neo-Lamarckism. For several political and scientific reasons, three of these positions – left Mendelism and both forms of neo-Lamarckism – were lost after 1930, while right Mendelism became crystallized as the mainstream eugenic option. This debate is important because, with epigenetics lately inspiring a return to soft heredity, some of the lost political options may be reactivated today. In particular, the cycle of degeneration and regeneration that characterized the politics, respectively, of right-wing and left-wing Lamarckians is ripe for renewal.

In this paper, I analyze the disruptive impact of Darwinian selectionism for the century-long tradition in which the environment had a direct causative role in shaping an organism's traits. In the case of humans, the surrounding environment often determined not only the physical, but also the mental and moral features of individuals and whole populations. With its apparatus of indirect effects, random variations, and a much less harmonious view of nature and adaptation, Darwinian selectionism severed the deep imbrication of organism and milieu posited by these traditional environmentalist models. This move had radical implications well beyond strictly biological debates. In my essay, I discuss the problematization of the moral idiom of environmentalism by William James and August Weismann who adopted a selectionist view of the development of mental faculties. These debates show the complex moral discourse associated with the environmentalist-selectionist dilemma. They also well illustrate how the moral reverberations of selectionism went well beyond the stereotyped associations with biological fatalism or passivity of the organism. Rereading them today may be helpful as a genealogical guide to the complex ethical quandaries unfolding in the current postgenomic scenario in which a revival of environmentalist themes is taking place. 1. The social significance of selectionism: revisiting the case in the postgenomic age We possess a well-defined picture of the way in which Darwin's natural selection absorbed and projected some of the wider social values of his time onto nature, as well as many of the intellectual sources (Malthus in primis) behind this transfer of values. However, the reverse relationship, the impact of Darwinian selectionism on the wider social and intellectual landscape remains a much more problematic area of investigation. Here, truly bogeymen terms such as Social Darwinism or eugenics have historically hampered a balanced

In this paper, I analyze the disruptive impact of Darwinian selectionism for the century-long tradition in which the environment had a direct causative role in shaping an organism's traits. In the case of humans, the surrounding environment often determined not only the physical, but also the mental and moral features of individuals and whole populations. With its apparatus of indirect effects, random variations, and a much less harmonious view of nature and adaptation, Darwinian selectionism severed the deep imbrication of organism and milieu posited by these traditional environmentalist models. This move had radical implications well beyond strictly biological debates. In my essay, I discuss the problematization of the moral idiom of environmentalism by William James and August Weismann who adopted a selectionist view of the development of mental faculties. These debates show the complex moral discourse associated with the environmentalist-selectionist dilemma. They also well illustrate how the moral reverberations of selectionism went well beyond the stereotyped associations with biological fatalism or passivity of the organism. Rereading them today may be helpful as a genealogical guide to the complex ethical quandaries unfolding in the current postgenomic scenario in which a revival of environmentalist themes is taking place.

This book explores the socio-political implications of human heredity from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present postgenomic moment. It addresses three main phases in the politicization of heredity: the peak of radical eugenics (1900-1945), characterized by an aggressive ethos of supporting the transformation of human society via biological knowledge; the repositioning, after 1945, of biological thinking into a liberal-democratic, human rights framework; and the present postgenomic crisis in which the genome can no longer be understood as insulated from environmental signals.
In Political Biology, Maurizio Meloni argues that thanks to the ascendancy of epigenetics we may be witnessing a return to soft heredity - the idea that these signals can cause changes in biology that are themselves transferable to succeeding generations. This book will be of great interest to scholars across science and technology studies, the philosophy and history of science, and political and social theory.

Building on Fox Keller's acute genealogy of the nature–nurture opposition as located in a certain specific social, cultural, and political history in the late nineteenth century (2010), in this paper, I address a parallel problem: the making of a really modern (i.e., non-biological) sociology nearly at the same time as the " hard disjunction " (Keller, 2010) between heredity and the environment, nature and nurture, was made. I argue rather provocatively that traces of borrowing from hard heredity to sociology can be seen in Durkheim's strategic usage of Weismann to destroy Lamarckian sociology. The tran-scendence of the social in Durkheim is entirely isomorphic to Weismann's transcendence of the germ plasm: in both cases, they aimed to construct objective realities, radically independent and exterior from individual tendencies and peculiarities. Weismann offered Durkheim an important scientific companion to make boundaries between sociology and biology. In a Latourian sense (Latour, 1993), the purification strategy of Durkheim was actually helped by a hybridization with Weismann's biology. In conclusion, by taking Weismann as an anticipator of the genetics revolution a few years later, I argue for a profound complicity between twentieth century non-biological sociology and genetics. They both made space for a neat distinction between biological heredity and sociocultural transmission, heredity, and heritage. If sociology and genetics thought of themselves as rivals and even enemies in explaining social facts, they should reconsider their positions.

IN LIEU OF AN ABSTRACT, INTRODUCTION:
In 1910 the British eugenics movement was shaken by a violent debate on the long-term effects of alcoholism. A study of the Galton Laboratory, under Karl Pearson’s supervision, denied the existence of a relationship “between parental alcoholism and defective health in the children.” Challenging the evidence of the so-called ‘temperance doctors’, it argued that “the children of the intemperate are healthier than the children of the sober”—an indirect effect of the more virile constitutions of heavy-drinkers (Elderton and Pearson, 1910). Uproar followed  (....)

In an archaeological spirit this paper comes back to a founding event in the construction of the twentieth-century episteme, the moment at which the life-and the social sciences parted ways and intense boundary-work was carried out on the biology/society border, with significant benefits for both sides. Galton and Weismann for biology, and Alfred Kroeber for anthropology delimit this founding moment and I argue, expanding on an existing body of historical scholarship, for an implicit convergence of their views. After this excavation, I look at recent developments in the life sciences, which I have named the 'social turn' in biology (Meloni, 2014), and in particular at epigenetics with its promise to destabilize the social/biological border. I claim here that today a different account of 'the biological' to that established during the Galton–Kroeber period is emerging. Rather than being used to support a form of boundary-work, biology has become a boundary object that crosses previously erected barriers, allowing different research communities to draw from it. The greater fault is not with the biologists who have explained historical phenomena by organic processes, but with the sociologists who have accepted and welcomed these alien explanations. (Kroeber, 1916b: 34)

Biology: Scott and Marshall's authoritative and bestselling Dictionary of Sociology (2009) has no entry for it. There are entries for Wilfred Bion, the Kleinian psychoanalyst, or for sociometry, the almost-forgotten method of measuring social relationships. In place of biology, we find an entry for ‘biological reductionism, or biologism’, a pejorative term indicating the ideology of the deterministic application of biological findings to society. To make things more problematic, biologism has one reminder, Robert Ardrey, successful science-writer of stories of killer-ape human ancestors, very popular between the 1960s and the 1970s. Giants of the real history of biology, in contrast, such as August Weismann, or Theodosius Dobzhansky, are not even considered. And it is actually very difficult to imagine that Ardrey's speculation was somehow more relevant to the sociological imagination than Weismann's displacement of Lamarckism, or Dobzhansky's populational rethinking of race with its massive impact on post-1945 social sciences.

We begin on this admittedly somewhat polemical note not to start a further fire on the already troubled sociology/biology border. So many wars have already been fought, so much hostility has already been displayed that we really don't feel the need. Rather, in introducing this collection dedicated to Sociology-Biology Relations in the Twenty-First Century we wanted to bring to focus at the outset something that seems to us one of the very sources of so many problems, namely: What do sociologists think of when they say the word ‘biology’ both as a way of conceiving vital processes (life as such in its manifold dynamics) and as a form of expert knowledge (biology as an academic discipline)? Furthermore, who do they cite as examples if not exemplars of this biology in question?

In this paper, I firstly situate the current rise of interest in epigenetics in the broader history of attempts to go “beyond the gene” in twentieth-century biology. In the second part, after a summary of the main differences between epigenetic and genetic mutations, I consider what kind of implications the sui generis features of epigenetic mutations may have for the social sciences. I focus in particular on two sites of investigation: (a) the blurring of the boundaries between natural and social inequalities in theories of justice and their possible implications for public policy and public health and (b) a deepening of the notion that the constitution of the body is deeply dependent on its material and socially shaped surroundings (“embodied constructivism”). In conclusion, I advance some cautionary reflections on some of the (known and unprecedented) problems that the circulation of epigenetics in wider society may present.

This a slightly revised version of a text presented at the workshop “Embodied Being, Environing World: Local Biologies and Local Ecologies in Global Health”, organized by Alex Nading, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, and Nathanaël Cretin and supported by the Chair in Anthropology and Global Health in the Collège d’études mondiales and the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris, France on June 5 and 6, 2014. The text has been mostly left as originally presented, and therefore reflects an oral style of presentation, with no ambition of peer-reviewed accuracy. Thanks to Des Fitzgerald for kindly commenting on a first iteration of this text.

Epigenetics is one of the most rapidly expanding fields in the life sciences. Its rise is frequently framed as a revolutionary turn that heralds a new epoch both for gene-based epistemology and for the wider discourse on life that pervades knowledge-intensive societies of the molecular age. The fundamentals of this revolution remain however to be scrutinized, and indeed the very contours of what counts as ‘epigenetic’ are often blurred. This is reflected also in the mounting discourse on the societal implications of epigenetics, in which vast expectations coexist with significant uncertainty about what aspects of this science are most relevant for politics or policy alike. This is therefore a suitable time to reflect on the directions that social theory could most productively take in the scrutiny of this revolution. Here we take this opportunity in both its scholarly and normative dimension, that is, proposing a roadmap for social theorizing on epigenetics that does not shy away from, and indeed hopefully guides, the framing of its most socially relevant outputs. To this end, we start with an epistemological reappraisal of epigenetic discourse that valorizes the blurring of meanings as a critical asset for the field and privileged analytical entry point. We then propose three paths of investigation. The first looks at the structuring elements of controversies and visions around epigenetics. The second probes the mutual constitution between the epigenetic reordering of living phenomena and the normative settlements that orient individual and collective responsibilities. The third highlights the material import of epigenetics and the molecularization of culture that it mediates. We suggest that these complementary strands provide both an epistemically and socially self-reflective framework to advance the study of epigenetics as a molecular juncture between nature and nurture and thus as the new critical frontier in the social studies of the life sciences

The rise of molecular epigenetics over the last few years promises to bring the discourse about the sociality and susceptibility to environmental influences of the brain to an entirely new level. Epigenetics deals with molecular mechanisms such as gene expression, which may embed in the organism “memories” of social experiences and environmental exposures. These changes in gene expression may be transmitted across generations without changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetics is the most advanced example of the new postgenomic and context-dependent view of the gene that is making its way into contemporary biology. In my article I will use the current emergence of epigenetics and its link with neuroscience research as an example of the new, and in a way unprecedented, sociality of contemporary biology. After a review of the most important developments of epigenetic research, and some of its links with neuroscience, in the second part I reflect on the novel challenges that epigenetics presents for the social sciences for a re-conceptualization of the link between the biological and the social in a postgenomic age. Although epigenetics remains a contested, hyped, and often uncritical terrain, I claim that especially when conceptualized in broader non-genecentric frameworks, it has a genuine potential to reformulate the ossified biology/society debate.

In this paper I first offer a systematic outline of a series of conceptual novelties in the life-sciences that have favoured,over the last three decades,the emergence of a more social view of biology. I focus in particular on three areas of investigation: (1) technical changes in evolutionary literature that have provoked a rethinking of the possibility of altruism, morality and prosocial behaviours in evolution; (2) changes in neuroscience,from an understanding of the brain as an isolated data processor to the ultrasocial and multiply connected social brain of contemporary neuroscience; and (3) changes in molecular biology, from the view of the gene as an autonomous master of development to the ‘reactive genome’ of the new emerging field of molecular epigenetics. In the second section I reflect on the possible implications for the social sciences of this novel biosocial terrain and argue that the postgenomic language of extended epigenetic inheritance and blurring of the nature/nurture boundaries will be as provocative for neo-Darwinism as it is for the social sciences as we have known them. Signs of a new biosocial language are emerging in several social-science disciplines and this may represent an exciting theoretical novelty for twenty-first social theory.

The epistemology of the life sciences has significantly changed over the last two decades but many of these changes seem to remain unnoticed amongst sociologists: both the majority who reject biology and the few minorities who want to biologize social theory seem to share a common (biologistic) understanding of ‘the biological’ that appears increasingly out of date with recent advances in the biosciences. In the first part of this article I offer an overview of some contemporary importations of biological and neurobiological knowledge into the sociological field. In the second section I contrast this image of biological knowledge circulating in the social sciences with the more pluralist ways in which biology is theorized in many sectors of the life sciences. The ‘postgenomic’ view of biology emerging from this second section represents a challenge for the monolithic view of biology present amongst social theorists and a new opportunity of dialogue for social theorists interested in non-positivist ways of borrowing from the life sciences.

During the 20th century, genes were considered the controlling force of life processes, and the transfer of DNA the definitive explanation for biological heredity. Such views shaped the politics of human heredity: in the eugenic era, controlling heredity meant intervening in the distribution of 'good' and 'bad' genes. However, since the turn of the 21st century, this centrality of genes has been challenged by a number of 'postgenomic' disciplines. The rise of epigenetics in particular signals a shift from notions of biological fixedness to ideas of plasticity and 'impressionability' of biological material. This book investigates a longer history of the beliefs about the plasticity of human biology starting with ancient medicine, and analyzes the biopolitical techniques required to govern such permeability. It looks at the emergence of the modern body of biomedicine as a necessary displacement of earlier plastic views. Finally, it analyses the returning plasticity of contemporary postgenomic views and argues that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental management of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of potentialities. It is instead a plasticity that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community, with important implications for notions of risk, responsibility, and intervention.

Advanced Praise for Impressionable Biologies: With this impressive genealogy of the thinking that underwrites current interest in epigenetics, Meloni provides us with a much-needed frame for one of the most compelling ideas in contemporary bioscience. This book should be required reading for anyone curious about the ways that we, as living beings, carry the past both with and within us (Ed Cohen, Rutgers University)

Today environmental epigenetics and microbiomics are significantly contributing to a reconfiguration of the body as profoundly permeable to its surroundings and extensively shaped by environmental factors. These views of biological plasticity represent an important discontinuity with the bounded body of twentieth century biomedicine and genetics. This book offers an archaeology of the plastic body that is emerging in contemporary postgenomic disciplines. It investigates a longer history of the beliefs about the plasticity of human biology starting with ancient and early modern medicine, and analyses the biopolitical techniques required to govern such permeability. It looks at the emergence of the modern body of biomedicine as a necessary displacement of earlier plastic views in order to align the ancient biological body to the theoretical tenets of modern liberalism (autonomy, boundedness, inwardness, and property). Finally, it analyses the returning plasticity of contemporary postgenomic views and compares it to ancient and twentieth century views. Meloni argues that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental management of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of endless potentialities. It is instead a plasticity that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, malleability and fixity, individual and community. He dissects the complex sociological and biopolitical implications of this emerging plasticity (....)

For many decades now, the study of society and the study of biology have been estranged from one another. This Handbook provides the first comprehensive overview that shows how quickly we are moving beyond the acrimonious debates that characterized the biology/society border for most of the twentieth century. Bringing together a compelling array of interdisciplinary contributions, the Handbook illustrates how nuanced attention to both the biological and the social sciences opens up novel perspectives upon some of the most significant sociological, anthropological, philosophical and biological questions of our era.

Biosocial Matters: Rethinking Sociology-Biology Relations in the Twenty-First Century features a collection of readings from scholars in the vanguard of a reframing of biology/society debates within the sociological disciplines.

After years of disagreements bordering on open hostility between the social and life sciences, there appear to be encouraging signs of reconciliation—a shift in terrain where both “sides” of the erstwhile dispute are questioning their very premises. Biosocial Matters: Rethinking the Sociology-Biology Relations in the Twenty-First Century features a collection of readings from scholars on the vanguard of a reframing of biology/society debates within the sociological disciplines. Posing the question of whether a new biosocial terrain is indeed emerging, contributors explore ways this shift may contribute to a “revitalization” of sociology—and the biological imagination as well. Initial readings frame the battle lines through theoretical and historically-oriented contributions that reveal present renegotiations of the biological/social boundaries. Highlights include Tel Aviv University’s Eva Jablonka writing on cultural epigenetics and Exeter’s Tim Newton on the turn to biology. A final section focuses on in-depth analyses of epigenetics and neuroscience, two key frontiers in current sociology/biology debates. Readings include Luca Chiapperino and Giuseppe Testa of the University of Milan writing about the epigenomic self in personalized medicine, the University of Aberdeen’s John Bone on the nature and structure of neurosociology’s promise, Lisa Blackman of Goldsmiths College on the challenges of new bio/psycho/sociologies, and more. Pioneering and timely, Biosocial Matters offers illuminating insights into the long-overdue realignment between nature and sociology in the emergent decades of the twenty-first century.

This book explores the socio-political implications of human heredity from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present postgenomic moment. It addresses three main phases in the politicization of heredity: the peak of radical eugenics (1900-1945), characterized by an aggressive ethos of supporting the transformation of human society via biological knowledge; the repositioning, after 1945, of biological thinking into a liberal-democratic, human rights framework; and the present postgenomic crisis in which the genome can no longer be understood as insulated from environmental signals.
In Political Biology, Maurizio Meloni argues that thanks to the ascendancy of epigenetics we may be witnessing a return to soft heredity - the idea that these signals can cause changes in biology that are themselves transferable to succeeding generations. This book will be of great interest to scholars across science and technology studies, the philosophy and history of science, and political and social theory.

Se numerosi sono stati i tentativi di fornire una lettura filosofica di Freud e della psicoanalisi, questo lavoro prova a battere una strada in qualche modo opposta, puntando a offrire "un ascolto" psicoanalitico del testo filosofico e delle istituzioni sociali. Ciò che unisce i diversi capitoli del libro, dalla critica della società della comunicazione all'analisi del pensiero come forma autocurante della mente, fino alla messa in discussione dei paradigmi razionalistici che dominano la filosofia politica  (...)

In this review symposium, five scholars of history and philosophy of science and medicine take on the various challenges posed by Maurizio Meloni's Political Biology (Meloni, 2016a). These challenges are epitomized by what I call the Meloni Thesis. The thesis is that the discreteness of the biological and social sciences as bodies of knowledge depends on a hard nature/nurture distinction. Meloni argues that the hardness of this distinction was a late 19th century innovation of Francis Galton, who presented it as a cornerstone of his eugenics programme. Galton generally understood the distinction in terms of manipulable variables without too much ontological baggage. However, the distinction acquired metaphysical heft through the followers of August Weismann and Emile Durkheim in biology and sociology, respectively, in the 20th century (Meloni, 2016b). To be sure, both Weismann and Durkheim – like Galton – operated before Mendel's atom-like factor, popularized as the 'gene', came to dominate the research agenda on heredity. Nevertheless, the bio-social divide constructed around what is and is not 'genetic' served to marginalize the influence of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose original account of the evolution of life implied that significant attempts by an organism to adapt to its environment left physical traces in its offspring. However, the recent emergence of an area of research in molecular biology broadly defined as 'epigenetics' is returning us to the broadly Lamarckian mind-set that prevailed prior to Galton. Yet, ironically, this development is serving to re-specify if not embolden Galton's original eugenic concerns, reversing various conceptual and political measures that have been taken since the end of the Second World War to suppress them.

Palgrave MacMilllan, 2016, 284 pages In Political Biology, Maurizio Meloni, one of our most insightful social theorists of contemporary biology, guides us through heredity from the second half of the nineteenth century, through the twentieth " century of the gene " (Keller, 2000) and into the twenty-first century and the epigenetic present. Meloni expertly maps the consolidation of the paradigm of " hard heredity " that dominates most of the twentieth century.

During one of the most dramatic waves of racist and eugenic ideas in the early 20th century, the great paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson astutely observed that "Whether or not they are really pertinent, biological theories are being used in this field, and the biologist necessarily has a part in the discussion." Such fluxes of knowledge from biology to the wider society and their implications are the focus of Marianne Sommer's History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules. The book focuses on the work of American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), the British evolutionist Julian Huxley (1887–1975) and his work at the London Zoo and other facilities, and the Italian-born, Stanford-based geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (b. 1922) and his contributions to the Human Genome Diversity Project

Summary

In Lysenko's Ghost, historian Loren Graham explores the latest attempts to restore the legacy of the Ukrainian agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who spearheaded a campaign to reject Mendelian genetics in favor of a pseudoscientific theory of environmentally induced heredity in the USSR from the late 1920s to the mid-1960s. Today, in the midst of a period of high nationalist and anti-Western sentiments, it seems that a quirky coalition of Russian right wingers, Stalinists, a few qualified scientists,  and even the Orthodox Church is now claiming that Lysenko has been vindicated by the latest findings in molecular epigenetics.

Human crises of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic expose the foundations of our lives and compel
questions about the possibilities for our futures. The pandemic—a crisis simultaneously medical, cultural,
political, ecological, and economic—has carved new fault-lines within our societies, intensified existing ones,
and also opened new possibilities for care and human solidarity. COVID-19 is, or should be, both a “wake up
call” (Delanty, 2020) and a “portal” (Roy 2020). The possibilities of a post-COVID world, then, rest not only on
questions of vaccination or herd immunity, but on multifaceted, human processes of recovery, reconfiguration,
and repair. The social sciences and humanities are powerfully placed to inform these processes and the kinds
of post-COVID world we may yet inhabit.
In this global, interdisciplinary conference we invite panels and papers that draw from the humanities and
social science disciplines to attend to these urgent tasks of recovery, reconfiguration, and repair. In doing so,
we also acknowledge and invite consideration of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic represents only
one of many intersecting crises, both acute and ongoing, with which many people and places have had to
contend. These include the ongoing crises of settler colonialism and postcoloniality, climate change, ecological
destruction, as well as what theorist Lauren Berlant describes as the crisis ordinariness of precarious life in
late capitalism. We seek to attend, as well, to the unequal distributions of risk and vulnerability throughout
the pandemic, including between the Global South and North.

Human crises of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic expose the foundations of our lives and compel questions about the possibilities for our futures. The pandemic-a crisis simultaneously medical, cultural, political, ecological, and economic-has carved new fault-lines within our societies, intensified existing ones, and also opened new possibilities for care and human solidarity. The possibilities of a post-COVID world, then, rest not only on questions of vaccination or herd immunity, but on multifaceted, human processes of recovery, reconfiguration, and repair. In this global, interdisciplinary conference we invite panels and papers that draw from the humanities and social science disciplines to attend to these urgent tasks of recovery, reconfiguration, and repair. In doing so, we also acknowledge and invite consideration of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic represents only one of many intersecting crises, both acute and ongoing, with which many people and places have had to contend. These include the ongoing crises of settler colonialism and postcoloniality, climate change, ecological destruction, as well as what theorist Lauren Berlant describes as the crisis ordinariness of precarious life in late capitalism. We seek to attend, as well, to the unequal distributions of risk and vulnerability throughout the pandemic, including between the Global South and North.