Introduction: Human Animal Health in Medical Anthropology

Negotiating the necessity of biomedical animal use through relations with vulnerability

In the UK, claims are often made that public support for animal research is stronger when such use is categorised as for medical purposes. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of writing from the Mass Observation Project, a national writing project documenting everyday life in Britain, this paper suggests that the necessity of using animals for medical research is not a given but understood relationally through interactions with inherent vulnerability. This paper stresses the ubiquity of ambivalence towards uses of animals for medical research, complicating what is meant by claims that such use is ‘acceptable’, and suggests that science-society dialogues on animal research should accommodate different modes of thinking about health. In demonstrating how understandings of health are bound up with ethical obligations to care for both human and non-human others, this paper reinforces the importance of interspecies relations in health and illness and in the socio-ethical dimensions of biomedicine.

Contextualized understandings of dairy farmers' perspectives on antimicrobial use and regulation in Alberta, Canada

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been largely attributed to antimicrobial use (AMU). To achieve judicious AMU, much research and many policies focus on knowledge translation and behavioral change mechanisms. To address knowledge gaps in contextual drivers of decisions made by dairy farmers concerning AMU, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork to investigate one community's understanding of AMU, AMR, and associated regulations in the dairy industry in Alberta, Canada. This included participation in on-farm activities and observations of relevant interactions on dairy farms in central Alberta for 4 mo. Interviews were conducted with 25 dairy farmers. The interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis and yielded several key findings. Many dairy farmers in this sample: (1) value their autonomy and hope to maintain agency regarding AMU; (2) have shared cultural and immigrant identities which may inform their perspectives of future AMU regulation as it relates to their farming autonomy; (3) feel that certain AMU policies implemented in other contexts would be impractical in Alberta and would constrain their freedom to make what they perceive to be the best animal welfare decisions; (4) believe that their knowledge and experience are undervalued by consumers and policy makers; (5) are concerned that the public does not have a complex understanding of dairy farming and, consequently, worry that AMU policy will be based on misguided consumer concerns; and (6) are variably skeptical of a link between AMU in dairy cattle and AMR in humans due to their strict adherence to milk safety protocols that is driven by their genuine care for the integrity of the product. A better understanding of the sociocultural and political-economic infrastructure that supports such perceptions is warranted and should inform efforts to improve AMU stewardship and future policies regarding AMU.

Veterinary anthropology: Samples from an emerging field

We contribute to the growing field of veterinary humanities by promoting collaboration between veterinarians and anthropologists. Veterinary anthropology as we propose it analyzes the role of animal diseases in social life while questioning notions of animal health and human health. We distinguish three ways for veterinarians to collaborate with anthropologists, which more or less follow a chronological order. One form of collaboration requires anthropologists to bring risk perception or local knowledge on zoonoses identified by veterinarians. A more recent form of collaboration integrates veterinarians and anthropologists around the view of animals as actors in infrastructures of security. Finally, we suggest that, as veterinary expertise and its roles in contemporary societies is becoming an object of anthropological enquiry, a new space for collaboration is unfolding that enables veterinarians to see themselves through that reflexive lens of anthropological attention. Veterinary anthropology can therefore be defined as an anthropology of veterinarians and with veterinarians.

Compounding vulnerabilities: Syndemics and the social determinants of disease in the past

OBJECTIVE

This article explores the theory and utility of a syndemic approach for the study of disease in the past. Syndemic principles are examined alongside other theoretical developments within bioarchaeology. Two case studies are provided to illustrate the efficacy of this approach: Tuberculosis and vitamin D deficiency in 18th and 19th century England, and malaria and helminth infections in Early Medieval England.

MATERIALS

Public health studies of present syndemics, in addition to published bioarchaeological, clinical and social information relating to the chosen case studies.

METHODS

The data from these two historical examples are revisited within a syndemic framework to draw deeper conclusions about disease clustering and heterogeneity in the past.

RESULTS

A syndemic framework can be applied to past contexts using clinical studies of diseases in a modern context and relevant paleopathological, archaeological, and historical data.

CONCLUSIONS

This approach provides a means for providing a deeper, contextualised understanding ancient diseases, and integrates well with extant theoretical tools in bioarchaeology SIGNIFICANCE: Syndemics provides scholars a deep-time perspective on diseases that still impact modern populations.

LIMITATIONS

Many of the variables essential for a truly syndemic approach cannot be obtained from current archaeological, bioarchaeological, or historical methods.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

More detailed and in-depth analysis of specific disease clusters within the past and the present, which draws on a comprehensive analysis of the social determinants of health.

Vets and Vaccines: A Discursive Analysis of Pet Vaccine Critique

Critique of vaccination policy and practice has a long history, and social scientists and others have devoted significant efforts to understanding this phenomenon. This attention has only increased in light of the coronavirus pandemic, with public health concerns expressed about opposition to vaccination strategies. However, much less attention has thus far been devoted to understanding veterinary vaccine critique. This is problematic, given the central role of animals in the production and consumption of vaccines, and the existence of veterinary professional anxiety and international media coverage. The lack of existing literature may reflect a wider paucity of research on the veterinary profession; a paucity actively being challenged by new fields of veterinary anthropology and sociology. This short report is based on a discourse analysis of a UK campaign group, which questions aspects of companion animal vaccine policy. Findings suggest that the kinds of discourses used are similar to those made in the human vaccine domain: questions of risk, trust in expertise and imaginaries of science are thus not unique to human medicine. However, the article argues that some of the discourses identified are actually in line with wider social and cultural developments in healthcare. This argument has potential implications for veterinary professionals, as well as scholars interested in animal or human medicine. The article concludes by identifying future research trajectories, focused on further analysis of discursive practice, or the use of ethnographic observation to more fully understand the relationship between humans and non-humans, including animals and vaccine technologies.

Islam and Veterinary Science: Rethinking Animal Suffering Through Islamic Animal Ethics and the Evolving Definition of Halal Slaughter

In the midst of recent European activism against religious slaughter, the idea that religious slaughter is cruel to animals is often seen as commonsense, and the mandatory pre-slaughter stunning is often portrayed as the moral technology that assures animal welfare. Nevertheless, this portrayal seems to blur the fact that the current notion of animal welfare itself is built upon a changing selection of value assumptions, which are not without problems or academic debates. It also ignores the fact that contemporary veterinary scientists and Muslim scholars have been working together for four decades to learn more about farm animals and their suffering. Despite stereotypes, the idea of animal ethics is not foreign to Islam. In Islam, animals represent God's wisdom and wonder, and humans are obliged to attend to their health and living conditions. When killing animals for food is conducted, the slaughter must be done in the name of God as a sacred ritual in order to assure that the life of the animal is not taken lightly and that the slaughter is not a sign of hostility toward the universe. Before the act of sacrifice, the animal must be healthy, and no harm should be forced upon it. Accordingly, the requirement of pre-slaughter stunning has posed a question to Muslim scholars: Does stunning kill the animal or cause harm? What defines harm, and whose definition counts? This paper reconstructs a socio-technological history of halal slaughter through scientific research on animal suffering since the 1980s. On the basis of archival research of New Zealand veterinary scientists' works and in-depth interviews with Malaysian veterinary scientists, this article outlines three phases of the evolution of halal slaughter that aims to fulfill multiple sets of moral obligations toward farm animals, and demonstrates how veterinary scientists establish common ground between secular and Islamic animal ethics. In this vein, I am envisioning a possibility of veterinary anthropology that recognizes the field's trans-cultural characteristics, and continues to challenge the rigid binaries between the West and the Rest, and between science and culture.

“Using the same hand”: The complex local perceptions of integrated one health based interventions in East Africa

Background

Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) such as soil transmitted helminths (STH) and human rabies represent a significant burden to health in East Africa. Control and elimination remains extremely challenging, particularly in remote communities. Novel approaches, such as One Health based integrated interventions, are gaining prominence, yet there is more to be learned about the ways in which social determinants affect such programmes.

Methodology

In 2015 a mixed method qualitative study was conducted in northern Tanzania to determine community perceptions towards integrated delivery of two distinct healthcare interventions: treatment of children for STH and dog vaccination for rabies. In order to assess the effectiveness of the integrated approach, villages were randomly allocated to one of three intervention arms: i) Arm A received integrated mass drug administration (MDA) for STH and mass dog rabies vaccination (MDRV); ii) Arm B received MDA only; iii) Arm C received MDRV only.

Principle findings

Integrated interventions were looked upon favourably by communities with respondents in all arms stating that they were more likely to either get their dogs vaccinated if child deworming was delivered at the same time and vice versa. Participants appreciated integrated interventions, due to time and cost savings and increased access to essential health care. Analysis of qualitative data allowed deeper exploration of responses, revealing why people appreciated these benefits as well as constraints and barriers to participation in integrated programmes.

Conclusions/significance

An interdisciplinary One Health approach that incorporates qualitative social science can provide key insights into complex local perceptions for integrated health service delivery for STH and human rabies. This includes providing insights into how interventions can be improved while acknowledging and addressing critical issues around awareness, participation and underlying health disparities in remote pastoralist communities.

Coalitions of touch: Balancing restraint and haptic soothing in the veterinary clinic

This article responds to recent calls to further incorporate the study of animal health care into the sociology of health and illness. It focuses on a theme with a long tradition in medical sociology, namely clinical communication, but explores matters distinctive to veterinary practice. Drawing on video recordings of 60 consultations across three small animal veterinary clinics in the United Kingdom, we explore how clients and veterinarians (or "vets") fashion fleeting "coalitions of touch," that aptly position the animal to enable the performance of medical work, often in the face of physical resistance. Building on recent developments in the study of haptic sociality, we analyse how care and emotional concern for animal patients is communicated through various forms of embodied action; thus, how the problematics of forced care and restraint are mitigated through distinctive ways of touching and holding animal patients. Moreover, while prior studies of small animal veterinary work have highlighted the significance of talk within the clinician-animal-client triad, we reveal the fundamentally embodied and collaborative work of managing and controlling patients during sometimes intense and fast-moving episodes of veterinary care.

Visiting Hours: Spacetimes of Human-Animal Interaction in South African Elder Care

This article examines human-animal interaction in elder care by focusing on an old age home in postapartheid South Africa. Residents admire and desire to be near animals, but staff mostly prohibit pets and service animals due to regulations about hygiene and frailty. Instead, people make meaningful relationships with media representations of animals and wilder animals in the home's yard. This article uses the clinical timescale of visiting hours to interpret these alternative human-animal interactions and their temporal incongruities-to show how people make sense of differences they perceive between their own and animals' mortality and longevity, and how animals enable remembering and articulations of aging selfhood and social relations across the life course. A reinterpretation of visiting hours reveals the making of self-other distinctions in late life and temporal aspects of medical institutionalism that shape multispecies relations.

One Health Animal Disaster Management: An Ethics of Care Approach

In this article, we consider the One Health framework for orienting guidance for animal disaster management through an ethics of care approach. While One Health was created at the beginning of the 21st century in response to the persistence of emerging infectious diseases and the view that the health of humans and other animals are contiguous, it can be a useful tool for promoting animal welfare and considering animals' experiences during a disaster. However, implementing One Health strategies into animal disaster management is not without its challenges, since ethical judgments are implicit in all decisions and recommendations made about how to conceptualize a "disaster" and their impact on animals and their welfare. Our discussion is divided into three sections. First, we consider the significance of a One Health framework for animal disaster management. Here, we highlight how One Health strategies can be employed in disaster health and natural disaster. Next, we use an ethics of care approach to lay the contours for an interspecies account of relational solidarity, thus offering a vision for how One Health strategies can reimagine the ethical dilemmas involving human-animal conflicts during a disaster. Lastly, we consider the textured nature of our relationship with animals, the moral weight of common vulnerability and interdependency and illuminating insights from animal welfare science.

Zootherapy as a potential pathway for zoonotic spillover: a mixed-methods study of the use of animal products in medicinal and cultural practices in Nigeria

BACKGROUND

Understanding how and why people interact with animals is important for the prevention and control of zoonoses. To date, studies have primarily focused on the most visible forms of human-animal contact (e.g., hunting and consumption), thereby blinding One Health researchers and practitioners to the broader range of human-animal interactions that can serve as cryptic sources of zoonotic diseases. Zootherapy, the use of animal products for traditional medicine and cultural practices, is widespread and can generate opportunities for human exposure to zoonoses. Existing research examining zootherapies omits details necessary to adequately assess potential zoonotic risks.

METHODS

We used a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative data from questionnaires, key informant interviews, and field notes to examine the use of zootherapy in nine villages engaged in wildlife hunting, consumption, and trade in Cross River State, Nigeria. We analyzed medicinal and cultural practices involving animals from a zoonotic disease perspective, by including details of animal use that may generate pathways for zoonotic transmission. We also examined the sociodemographic, cultural, and environmental contexts of zootherapeutic practices that can further shape the nature and frequency of human-animal interactions.

RESULTS

Within our study population, people reported using 44 different animal species for zootherapeutic practices, including taxonomic groups considered to be "high risk" for zoonoses and threatened with extinction. Variation in use of animal parts, preparation norms, and administration practices generated a highly diverse set of zootherapeutic practices (n = 292) and potential zoonotic exposure risks. Use of zootherapy was patterned by demographic and environmental contexts, with zootherapy more commonly practiced by hunting households (OR = 2.47, p < 0.01), and prescriptions that were gender and age specific (e.g., maternal and pediatric care) or highly seasonal (e.g., associated with annual festivals and seasonal illnesses). Specific practices were informed by species availability and theories of healing (i.e., "like cures like" and sympathetic healing and magic) that further shaped the nature of human-animal interactions via zootherapy.

CONCLUSIONS

Epidemiological investigations of zoonoses and public health interventions that aim to reduce zoonotic exposures should explicitly consider zootherapy as a potential pathway for disease transmission and consider the sociocultural and environmental contexts of their use in health messaging and interventions.

One Health Paradigm to Confront Zoonotic Health Threats: A Pakistan Prospective

The emergence and re-emergence of zoonotic diseases significantly impact human health, particularly those who live in impoverished areas and have close contact with domestic or wild animals. Nearly 75% of zoonotic diseases are transmitted directly from animals to humans or indirectly via vector/agent interactions between animals and humans. Growing populations, globalization, urbanization, and the interaction of the environment with humans and livestock all play roles in the emergence and spread of zoonotic diseases. "One Health" is a multidisciplinary concept aimed at improving human, animal, and environmental health, but this concept is not widely accepted in developing countries. In Pakistan, environmental, human, and animal health are severely affected due to a lack of sufficient resources. This review article provides an overview of the most common zoonotic diseases found in Pakistan and emphasizes the importance of the "One Health" concept in managing these diseases. Given the current situation, interdisciplinary research efforts are required to implement and sustain effective and long-term control measures in animal, human, and environmental health surveillance and accurate diagnostic methods.

Military Dogs and Their Soldier Companions: The More-than-human Biopolitics of Leishmaniasis in Conflict-torn Colombia

Cutaneous leishmaniasis is a vector‐borne disease that produces growing skin ulcers. In Colombia, the transmitting phlebotomine sandfly is native to the same jungles that have been the primary theater of war. Although combatants are the most affected by leishmaniasis, military landmine detection dogs are also significantly impacted. This article draws on ethnographic field research with human and canine members of the Colombian military. While their leishmaniasis ulcers constitute a shared expression of violence that makes evident the closeness of the human–dog bond, differences in their state‐provided health care reveal the production of shifting species hierarchies. I argue that war scrambles both human–dog affective relationships and biopolitically configured interspecies hierarchies in ways that produce suffering, not just for humans and dogs separately, but also for the bonds they forge together. Building peace through health care demands repairing the ways in which armed violence has rendered the bonds between humans and nonhumans pathological.

Covid-19 and disaster capitalism: “Passando a boiada” in the Brazilian meat processing chain

Abstract The article discusses the social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the meat processing industry in southern Brazil. Based on the notion of disaster capitalism, we examine how political and corporate agents have taken advantage of the health catastrophe to create a privileged space for simplifications and deregulation in this sector. According to our reasoning, they accelerate precarious work in the meat industry and amplify the harmful effects of agribusiness on local ecologies and global ecosystems. In light of this, we also emphasize the analytical potential that results from the intersection between the categories of syndemics and structural violence to displace the traditional analyses of risk groups and behaviors in highlighting environments and their agents.

'COVID containers' in pandemic mediascapes: discursive economies of health, bodies, and race in North America

Bringing an ethnographic sensibility to pandemic mediascapes, this article critically examines three media artifacts that assembled around COVID-19 - as an entity that is viral, social, and political - in the early months of the pandemic in North America. Focusing on the household, the cruise ship, and the body-with-underlying-conditions as 'COVID containers', the author argues that material and discursive responses to the pandemic, articulated through imaginaries of containers and containment, uphold notions of risk, order, and health that garner meaning through implied racial intertexts. The article analyzes COVID-19-related data, graphics, talk, and news stories to show how logics of inside/outside, safety/risk, and comfort/fear that animate efforts to contain a viral threat intensify the pathologization, harm, surveillance, and risk of groups long imagined as 'threats' to social order. Throughout, The author demonstrates how idioms of containers and containment make 'the body' a key locus of health, diverting attention from systems and histories complicit in producing ill-health. A coda reflects on Scheper-Hughes and Lock's influential essay ' The mindful body', re-reading their articulation of the 'Western body' through lenses drawn from scholarship in Black studies, queer studies, and disability studies that are central to understanding COVID-19 as relation(s) - borne from racial capitalism - that differentially distribute risk, health, and care.

Introducing the Microbes and Social Equity Working Group: Considering the Microbial Components of Social, Environmental, and Health Justice

Humans are inextricably linked to each other and our natural world, and microorganisms lie at the nexus of those interactions. Microorganisms form genetically flexible, taxonomically diverse, and biochemically rich communities, i.e., microbiomes that are integral to the health and development of macroorganisms, societies, and ecosystems. Yet engagement with beneficial microbiomes is dictated by access to public resources, such as nutritious food, clean water and air, safe shelter, social interactions, and effective medicine. In this way, microbiomes have sociopolitical contexts that must be considered. The Microbes and Social Equity (MSE) Working Group connects microbiology with social equity research, education, policy, and practice to understand the interplay of microorganisms, individuals, societies, and ecosystems. Here, we outline opportunities for integrating microbiology and social equity work through broadening education and training; diversifying research topics, methods, and perspectives; and advocating for evidence-based public policy that supports sustainable, equitable, and microbial wealth for all.

One Health of Peripheries: Biopolitics, Social Determination, and Field of Praxis

Amid the urgency to solve countless and severe health problems, asking what is health or who can and must have it may seem like a waste of time. However, some responses can reveal prevailing practices that divert attention from fundamental problems, thus maintaining privileges and deepening health inequities. One Health of Peripheries arises from these questions and takes three interdependent senses. The first refers to attributes determining the well-being and suffering of peripheral multispecies collectives: a state, a process, the realization of capacities. The second problematizes marginalizing apparatuses that define health and who can and should have it. The third encompasses practices in more-than-human social spaces in which, and through which, One Health is experienced, understood, and transformed. The qualification of health as “one” does not refer to the lack of plurality, nor to the simple aggregation of health fragments (human + animal + environmental), but to the complexity of health in a field with peripheral places, ensuing from margins to privilege those who are inside and legitimize the exploitation of those who are outside. The interaction among margins creates degrees and kinds of privilege and vulnerability that materialize epidemiologic profiles while articulating different peripheral strengths and needs supports a collective resistance to break margins. Social determination, a key concept in the (Latin American) collective health movement, underlies such profiles. However, this movement overlooks the more-than-human dimension of social determination; that is to say, One Health of Peripheries is a blind spot of collective health. The cartography of One Health of Peripheries has unique needs regarding participation, research, and inclusive policies for the decolonial promotion of healthy lifestyles.

The Vascularity of Ayurvedic Leech Therapy: Sensory Translations and Emergent Agencies in Interspecies Medicine

This article offers vascularity as a multi-dimensional imaginary for the interspecies entanglements constituting Ayurvedic leech therapy. Whether, when, where, and how a leech decides to bite, suck, and release comprise pivotal junctures in leech therapy as practiced in southern Kerala, India. In the course of leech-human intra-actions, leeches translate matter, providing sensory mediation, relief, and amusement. Enmeshed in social and ecological relations inflected by gender, religion, class, and caste, this analysis of Ayurvedic leech therapy reframes questions of agencies starting with and from the viewpoint of the vascular capacities of leeches in their interactions with humans. This image of vascularity provides an analytic for the emergent agencies of humans and leeches constituted by sensory intra-actions at branching points in this multispecies clinical practice.

Linking humans, their animals, and the environment again: a decolonized and more-than-human approach to "One Health"

This article considers a broad perspective of "One Health" that includes local and animal knowledge. Drawing from various colonial efforts to link human, animal, and environmental health, it first shows that the current "One Health" initiative has its roots in colonial engagement and coincides with a need to secure the health of administrators (controlling that of local populations), while pursing use of resources. In our contemporary period of repeated epidemic outbreaks, we then discuss the need for greater inclusion of social science knowledge for a better understanding of complex socio-ecological systems. We show how considering anthropology and allied sub-disciplines (anthropology of nature, medical anthropology, and human-animal studies) highlights local knowledge on biodiversity as well as the way social scientists investigate diversity in relation to other forms of knowledge. Acknowledging recent approaches, specifically multispecies ethnography, the article then aims to include not only local knowledge but also non-human knowledge for a better prevention of epidemic outbreaks. Finally, the conclusion stresses the need to adopt the same symmetrical approach to scientific and profane knowledge as a way to decolonize One Health, as well as to engage in a more-than-human approach including non-human animals as objects-subjects of research.

Rethinking One Health: Emergent human, animal and environmental assemblages

One Health perspectives are growing in influence in global health. One Health is presented as being inherently interdisciplinary and integrative, drawing together human, animal and environmental health into a single gaze. Closer inspection, however, reveals that this presentation of entanglement is dependent upon an apolitical understanding of three pre-existing separate conceptual spaces that are brought to a point of connection. Drawing on research with livestock keepers in northern Tanzania, in the context of the history of livestock policy in colonial and postcolonial East Africa, this demonstrates what an extended model of One Health - one that moves from bounded human, animal and environmental sectors to co-constitutive assemblages - can do to create a flexible space that is inclusive of the multiplicity of health.

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We show that One Health is based on conceptual separation

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Colonial and postcolonial health policy in East Africa enacted this separation

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Critical social science forces One Health to recognise interspecies entanglements.

From more-than-human solidarity to multi-species biographical value: insights from a veterinary school about ethical dilemmas in One Health promotion

This article features a partnership between a veterinary school and a charity that aims to enhance the wellbeing of low-income people. Through this partnership, the charity periodically hosts veterinary clinics for clients and their pets. Even as the veterinarians and veterinary students duly examine people's pets, these pop-up clinics aim to help people and their pets. Hence our analysis revolves around the ethics of 'more-than-human solidarity'. By 'more-than-human solidarity', we mean efforts to help others that either center on or that implicate non-human beings. To delve into the ethical and sociological implications of subsidised veterinary services, and to assist with program planning, we conducted several in-depth interviews with veterinarians. Most substantively, we found that the veterinary school's outreach clinics give rise to multi-species biographical value, which is prized as a pedagogical resource for veterinary students. The veterinarians whom we interviewed felt troubled by the extent to which the pop-up clinics ultimately benefited the veterinary school, but also by the shortage of subsidised veterinary services in the vicinity. Based on these interviews and our own reflections, we invite more scholarship on cultural, economic and political influences that shape the lives of human beings and non-human animals alike.

Animals, veterinarians and the sociology of diagnosis

While sociologists of medicine have focused their efforts on understanding human health, illness, and medicine, veterinary medical practice has not yet caught their attention in any sustained way. In this critical review article, we use insights from the sociology of diagnosis literature to explore veterinary practice, and aim to demonstrate the importance of animals to sociological understandings of health, illness and disease. As in human medicine, our analysis shows the importance of diagnosis in creating and maintaining the power and authority of the veterinary professional. However, we then explore how diagnosis operates as a kind of dance, where professional authority can be challenged, particularly in light of the complex ethical responsibilities and clinical interactions that result from the triad of professional/owner/animal patient. Finally, we consider diagnosis via the precept of entanglement, and raise the intriguing possibility of interspecies health relations, whereby decision-making in human health care may be influenced by experiences in animal health care and vice-versa. In our conclusion, we argue that this analysis provides opportunities to scholars researching diagnosis in human health care, particularly around the impact of commercial drivers; has implications for veterinary and public health practitioners; and should help animate the emerging sociology of veterinary medicine.

Multidisciplinarity in Microbiome Research: A Challenge and Opportunity to Rethink Causation, Variability, and Scale

This essay, written by a biologist, a microbial ecologist, a biological anthropologist, and an anthropologist-historian, examines tensions and translations in microbiome research on animals in the laboratory and field. The authors trace how research questions and findings in the laboratory are extrapolated into the field and vice versa, and the shifting evidentiary standards that these research settings require. Showing how complexities of microbiomes challenge traditional standards of causation, the authors contend that these challenges require new approaches to inferences used in ecology, anthropology, and history. As social scientists incorporate investigations of microbial life into their human studies, microbiome researchers venture into field settings to develop mechanistic understandings about the functions of complex microbial communities. These efforts generate new possibilities for cross-fertilizations and inference frameworks to interpret microbiome findings. Microbiome research should integrate multiple scales, levels of variability, and other disciplinary approaches to tackle questions spanning conditions from the laboratory to the field.