Nature, Culture, and Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Life by Gisli Palsson (review)

What do Manhattan spit parties, Innuit genomics, Nim Chimpsky, and Icelandic fishing have in common? All have been taken up by Gisli Palsson as ethnographic objects capable of providing anthropological insights into the ways that life itself is being perpetually remade via research in genetics, as well as human–animal and human–environment relations. In Nature, Culture, and Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Life, Palsson brings together a collection of essays that draw on material he has published over the last 20 years. Reading the essays back-to-back provides insight into Palsson's intriguing style, which combines astute summaries of contemporary theoretical debates with often arcane but relevant historical references to introduce unexpected empirical studies. Eventually, this allows him eventually to ask thought-provoking questions relevant to the field of anthropology and life in the contemporary moment. Reading him in this way also gives us insight into his ethics and what matters to him as a scholar.

The book is introduced via an interesting and highly readable discussion of the increasingly popular term and frame of biosociality, which includes reflections on a relational understanding of life, the relationship between cultural and physical anthropology, and the dissolution of nature/culture divides. The book is divided into three parts. The first focuses on "selves" and examines the ways that materialities and imaginings related to emerging genetic technologies shape exclusion and belonging and also provide novel explanations for social life today. Part two attends to "bodies" and shifts its focus to look at relationships between humans and nonhumans. The third part of the book, "biospheres," tackles emerging debates on the Anthropocene, with a focus on situated knowledge and human–environment relations. The book ends with an afterword that discusses how new understandings of life have shaped anthropological inquiry and theory in recent decades before leaving us with a set of key questions, simultaneously poignant and relevant for the future of life on our planet.

Included in the first part of the book are four chapters that examine personal genomics, that is, engagement with gene sequencing technologies by individuals and communities beyond the domain of scientific research. Palsson's erudition and wit are on display as he guides us through his multi-scaled and historically constructed "field." Readers learn about the aforementioned spit party during a 2008 Fashion Week event in Manhattan, retail DNA testing by companies with names like 23andMe and deCode, the entwined political, economic, and genetic stakes of Arctic indigenous identities, and the ways that names and naming practices can serve as technologies of exclusion and belonging. In Chapter 3 specifically, Palsson situates his analysis in relation to Marxist economic theories of labor and consumption. He demonstrates the multiple ways that knowledge production in genomics and biomedicine more broadly rely on the extraction, reproduction, and exchange of bodily material, which results in new forms of laboring, production, reproduction, and consumption.

The second part of the book consists of three chapters, focusing respectively on the relationship between physical and biological anthropology, human–animal relations, and what might be considered the new biosocial frontiers of the womb and outer space. In Chapter 6, Palsson invites us to rethink human variation, arguing that in recent decades the very notions of biology and the body have become increasingly and radically socialized, while social theory and society have become "thoroughly embodied and materialized" (80). Summarizing feminist challenges to the making of race via biological anthropology and recent research in epigenetics, he convincingly argues that the raced, gendered, and sexualized body is inextricably entangled in socially constructed epistemic fields, as well as in the environment. Chapter 7 draws on the case of human-raised chimpanzees, most notably Nim Chimpsky, to explore the collapsed divide between nature and culture. Describing chimpanzees as a liminal, or border species, Palsson highlights the rich symbolism of scientific engagement with these primates, making it clear that such an examination provides rich insight into human alterity. The last chapter of this section takes up languages of voyaging and...