Impressionable Biologies ― From the Archaeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics

Today environmental epigenetics and microbiomics are significantly contributing to a reconfiguration of the body as profoundly permeable to its surroundings and extensively shaped by environmental factors. These views of biological plasticity represent an important discontinuity with the bounded body of twentieth century biomedicine and genetics.

This book offers an archaeology of the plastic body that is emerging in contemporary postgenomic disciplines. It investigates a longer history of the beliefs about the plasticity of human biology starting with ancient and early modern medicine, and analyses the biopolitical techniques required to govern such permeability. It looks at the emergence of the modern body of biomedicine as a necessary displacement of earlier plastic views in order to align the ancient biological body to the theoretical tenets of modern liberalism (autonomy, boundedness, inwardness, and property). Finally, it analyses the returning plasticity of contemporary postgenomic views and compares it to ancient and twentieth century views. Meloni argues that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental management of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of endless potentialities. It is instead a plasticity that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, malleability and fixity, individual and community. He dissects the complex sociological and biopolitical implications of this emerging plasticity for notions of risk, responsibility, gender, race, intervention, and health inequalities.

The book, at the intersection of sociology of the body, science and technology studies, and the history of science, will interest students and scholars of the philosophy of science and of political and social theory.

Maurizio Meloni is one of the few social scientists who has published comprehensively on epigenetics and its social, historical and conceptual implications. His publications have appeared in high profile scholarly journals (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Biosocieties, New genetics and Society, The Sociological Review, Sociology, Science) and are among the top cited publications in the social study of biology in these last years. They will represent – in a revised form - the building blocks for the present book. Maurizio is at present Senior research fellow in the Dept. of Sociology at the University of Sheffield. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics (Palgrave, 2016).