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Dialectics of Biocultural Interactions Because culture and lived experience is embodied in bodies and biology, and bodies and biology mediate lived experience, an understanding of human biology and biological processes can add a layer of information and viewpoint that is too often missed. Krieger (2001), for example, highlights the importance of following multiple “pathways of embodiment” that link social conditions to health. Such analyses can reach below the skin to show how daily events, linked to political-economic processes, affect skinfold thicknesses, blood pressures, stress hormones, rates of parasitism and anemia, and cumulative fertility and mortality rates. Demonstrating these relationships often requires direct measures of biological status, and examinations of the biological processes linking local-level experiences to biological outcomes. Over the past several decades, a host of new “biomarkers” employed by biocultural anthropologists have expanded the ability to track pathways of embodiment linking social conditions to biology and health (McDade and Harris 2018). One arena in which we can see the focus on biology as illuminating processes of inequality is through enhanced understandings of the biological pathways involved in syndemics, the synergistic interaction of multiple diseases (or stressors) that amplify negative health consequences (Singer and Mendenhal, this volume, Mendenhall et al. 2017 ; Singer 2009; Singer and Clair 2003). The diseases that make up syndemics are often linked through pathways that connect to underlying conditions of poverty and structural inequalities. Just as following pathways of embodiment (Krieger 2005) to trace the many ways lived experience becomes biology, it is also important to trace the reciprocal effects of biology on social and cultural life; embodied responses to environmental stressors reshape human–environment interactions. Humans and their environments are co-constructed, relational, and constantly in flux (Hoke and Schell 2020). In the words of Ingold and Palsson (2014), we are always “biosocial becomings.” Thus, critical biocultural approaches adopt a dialectical perspective on biocultural interactions; the biological and social and cultural elements of bodies are inextricably braided and mutually constitutive.

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