Commentary: Causal Enclosures—Over and Over
Commentary: Causal Enclosures—Over and Over
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评论：因果封闭——一遍又一遍
DOI：
10.1111/maq.12691
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发表时间：
2021
影响因子：
2.2
通讯作者：
Roberts, Elizabeth F.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Roberts, Elizabeth F.
悲观主义者可能是对的，这一点令人沮丧，但并不令人惊讶。当表观遗传学、微生物组和健康与疾病的发育起源似乎准备取代狭隘的遗传决定论时，一些社会科学家希望，世界上更多的动态复杂性将被纳入生命科学家关于我们如何随着时间的推移而形成的模型中。但正如几位重要的社会科学家所警告的那样，后基因组模型本可以包含更多的关系，但无法克服生命科学长期存在的还原论（Lock 2013;曼斯菲尔德2012; Niewohner 2011; Paxson and Helmreich 2014）。当生命科学家在微小的生物标记中寻找原因时，原因仍然很小，即使原因可能来自环境并代代相传。或许，后基因组学比遗传学更能在母子二人组的有限环境中找到原因，这使得人们更容易忽视一个日益遭到破坏的世界。批判性的女权主义学者、来自全球南方的理论家、北美原住民以及反种族主义研究人员和活动家已经清楚地阐述了新生的资本主义经济实践和现代国家工艺是如何封闭土地和身体，特别是女性身体的，正是通过将土地和身体分离，使它们可以被夺取、管理和控制（Federici 2004; Feely-Harnick 2014; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Hoover，2017; Keller 2010; Kimmerer 2015; King 2019）。后基因组模型和实践，例如承诺让更多世界进入的表观遗传学，只能在这些外壳内实现。在这本及时而重要的医学人类学季刊特刊中，文章的作者“走向代际人种学：亲属关系，队列和环境研究”表明，后基因组生命科学不断重新制造这些外壳。特刊的作者们把研究代际性的新兴科学方法作为他们的研究对象，发现即使有了这种扩展，专家们也只能减少。正如Kasia Tolwinski在本期中引用的那样，后基因组生命科学家“总是包括必须在结构水平上进行改变的序言，即使建议干预措施必须针对个体，分子水平”（Tolwinski 2019：157）。通过线性和垂直亲缘关系模型来研究粪便、甲基化标记和大脑，生命科学家只能将原因保持在很小的范围内。我认为这是“因果性的封闭”。
With despondency, but little surprise, it seems that the pessimists were probably right. When epigenetics, the microbiome, and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease seemed poised to replace narrow genetic determinism, some social scientists were hopeful that more of the world’s dynamic complexity would be included in life scientists’ models of how we come to be over time. But as several critical social scientists warned, post-genomic models, which could have been inclusive of more relations, could not overcome the long-standing reductionism of the life-sciences (Lock 2013; Mansfield 2012; Niewohner 2011; Paxson and Helmreich 2014). When life scientists look for cause in tiny bio-markers, cause stays small, even if cause can come from the environment and pass across generations. And perhaps, even more than with genetics, post-genomics finds cause in the circumscribed environment of the mother/child dyad, making it even easier to overlook an increasingly devastated world.Staying with small cause is constitutional to the life sciences within capitalism. Critical feminist scholars, theorists from the Global South, Native North Americans, and anti-racist researchers and activists have laid out ad nauseum how nascent capitalist economic practice and modern state-craft enclosed land and bodies, especially female bodies, making both land and body available for the taking, managing, and controlling, precisely through their separation (Federici 2004; Feely-Harnick 2014; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Hoover, 2017, Keller 2010; Kimmerer 2015; King 2019). Post-genomic models and practices, like epigenetics that promised to let more of the world in, can only do so within these enclosures. The authors of the articles in this timely and important special issue of Medical Anthropology Quarterly,“Towards Intergenerational Ethnography: Kinship, Cohorts and Environments Research,” demonstrate that post-genomic life sciences keep making these enclosures afresh. The special issue authors take emergent scientific approaches to intergenerationality as their object of study, and find that even with this expansion, experts can only reduce. As Kasia Tolwinski, cited in this issue, tells us, post-genomic life scientists “always include the preface that changes must be made at a structural level, even as it is recommended that interventions must target the individual, molecular level”(Tolwinski 2019: 157). By investigating shit, methylation markers, and brains through linear and vertical kinship models, life scientists can only keep cause small. I think of this as “causal enclosure.”