Anthropology and Microbes
Keywords:
Microbes, Infectious diseases, Antimicrobial resistance, Microbiome, SARS-CoV-2Abstract
Microbes have been interested in anthropologists for at least 70 years. It begins
with studies of sociocultural factors on emergences and epidemic of infectious diseases
caused by pathogenic microbes and on the efficiency of interventions, from 1950 to
1970. The awareness of antimicrobial resistance in the early 21st century, later, shapes
anthropologist to explore the ways human activities affect mutations of microbes to
survive, especially antibiotic uses and their structural factors. The Human Microbiome
Project commenced in 2008 push anthropologists to reconsider and improve concepts
employed to study the body, human-environmental relationships and throw a challenge
on the human being. The current pandemic of SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, bring
attention from anthropologists to contribute ideas and observations, among them
including human-animal (pet and wild) relationships influencing cross-species epidemic,
different effects from interventions among people caused by inequality between poor
and rich, racism and xenophobia and global food chains in post-COVID -19. In this article,
I argue that microbes and anthropology generate a co-evolution, in which anthropology
introduce microbe to social science and humanities while microbes improve medical
anthropology and anthropology in general both in term of theory and applications.
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