PLASTICITY, BIOPOWER AND EMPIRE: An Archaeology

• In Event: Political Transformations of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and Epigenetics in the Global South 2

Abstract

Histories of plasticity of the body and direct environmental effects on the human genome or microbiome become more visible by the day. It is particularly in the Global South or among vulnerable populations in the North, that scientists find compelling cases to detect this emerging porosity of the body to its local surroundings. Environmental effects are mostly seen in negative terms: pollutants, malnutrition, violence and trauma. I suggest here an archaeology of plasticity as a tool of biopolitical government in ancient and early-modern times before the rise of the modern biomedical body. I claim that particularly with humoralism in its global ramifications, the biopolitical problem of how to live with a permeable body –plasticity as a form of life - is pervasive and unequally distributed across gender and ethnic groups. The differential plasticity of various populations was used since the beginning of Western medicine as a form of biopolitical distinction between ruling and ruled groups, Greeks and Asians, temperate countries and the tropics, inaugurating a tradition that will last until nineteenth-century colonialism: plasticity at the service of military conquest. I argue then that we need to excavate this deep history of plasticity as always gendered and racialized to see why today it is particularly on the bodies of women and oppressed groups that this notion has become visible in biomedical writings. This paper is a contribution to a reconceptualization of the history of racism and biopower as entangled with notions of plasticity and environmental effects rather than fixity and innateness.

Author

• Maurizio Meloni