Evidentiary Symbiosis: On Paraethnography in Human–Microbe Relations

Abstract

Though microbial infections are central concerns for public health workers in urban Nicaragua, health workers there rarely if ever speak of the existence of a ‘microbiome’ when they address such problems. Among scientists and the public in the United States, on the other hand, the microbiome, seen as the ‘internal ecosystem’ that regulates the workings of human guts, is a regular topic of conversation. This raises questions about how one might go about doing a social study of the microbiome in places where it does not (yet) exist as a category of expert practice or public discourse. Evidence from Nicaragua and the United States highlights two sites at which experts engage people in research and discussion about microbial ecologies. In their work, U.S. microbiome scientists and Nicaraguan public health workers both engage in ‘paraethnography,’ the practice of collecting and analyzing qualitative information that does not fit into statistical or other kinds of scientific models. In the United States, paraethnography has driven both traditional scientific experiments on the microbiome and online, crowd-sourced experimental platforms for collecting and analyzing information about gut microbes. In Nicaragua, hygienists generate paraethnographic evidence through word-of-mouth, radio, and print media. A comparison between the work of U.S. scientists and that of Nicaraguan hygienists suggests three different ways (commensal, parasitic, and mutualistic) in which the cultural/interpretive evidence of paraethnography interfaces symbiotically with the quantitative/statistical evidence of bioscience. Attention to evidentiary symbiosis provides insights into the operations of publicly oriented science under conditions of bodily and planetary uncertainty.

Keywords:

• microbiome
• Nicaragua
• hygiene
• food studies
• science communication

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Les Levidow, Kean Birch, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful commentary during the various stages of editorial review. I am grateful for the feedback I received on earlier versions of this paper from Jamie Lorimer, Beth Greenhough, and the Life After the Anthropocene forum at the University of Oxford, as well from Ann Kelly, Christos Lynteris, and the other organizers and participants at the 2015 Association of Social Anthropologists meeting at the University of Exeter.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In 2014, Whole Foods Market was sued by the parents of an 8-year-old boy alleged to have died from exposure to E. coli in beef purchased at one of the chain's Massachusetts stores (Sonfist, 2014).

Additional information

Funding

Funding for the original research was provided by the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright Hays, and a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant [No. 0849650].