Trauma Induced Dementia and Rendering the Biosocial Molar

• In Event: Unpacking biosocial approaches to stress & trauma - III

Abstract

There is a growing belief that at least some Alzheimer’s-like dementias need to be understood in environmental, rather than simply genetic, terms. In this reimagining, “trauma” is articulated as key to understanding dementia and, in particular, brain trauma emerges as a key risk factor. This focus upon trauma and dementia can be understood as part of a broader biosocial “turn” within the biomedical sciences, a turn that has seen a refiguring of the relationship between “nature” and “culture.” The practises of the “new biologies,” such as epigenetics and neuroplasticity, have been strongly implicated in this turn, as have a variety of sociological consequences, not least the ‘molecularisation of biography and milieu’ (Niewöhner, 2011). It is here that trauma-induced dementias depart from many other conditions mapped in the contemporary biosocial field, for the “environmental” cause here appears resolutely molar – not intracellular but the car crash, the battlefield, or the abusive household – while “trauma” is not figured as embodied and intergenerational but as a blunt, external force. Discussing my ethnographic work with neuropathologists, molecular neuroscientists, and sport scientists, I here consider if and how the sciences of trauma-induced neurodegenerative disease complement existing work theorising the emerging biosocial sciences. I, first, suggest that in continuing to conceptualise both the environment and trauma in molar terms, trauma-induced neurodegeneration complicates work that takes molecularisation as its point of departure for theorising the "new biologies" and, second, draw attention to a quite different and ongoing politics of life consolidating around environmental dementias.

Author

• Greg Hollin