Inheriting (Im)Possibility: Naturing Culture/Culturing Nature and the Vagaries of Being Human

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: What Gets Talked About? Examining Curricular Inclusion and Exclusion

Abstract

This paper critically examines the dominant perspectives of the social sciences on inheritance: heredity, culture, and interactionist/epigenetics. By leaning on the thesis ‘there is no outside of culture’, I deconstruct these three dominant perspectives and consider an alternative post-structuralist perspective that assumes nature as culture and culture as nature. This deconstruction opens up the way for rethinking the process of inheritance. I theoretically discuss inheritance as a process of double injunctions. That is, I posit the process of inheritance as discursive, situational, as that which chooses the human subject while simultaneously enabling the possibility for constrained choice. I argue that it is the process of double injunctions that produce the incalculabilities, the unpredictabilities, and the vagaries of Being human.

Author

• Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman, The University of Pennsylvania