Crossing at Y/Our Own Peril: Biocultural Boundary Crossing in Anthropology

GRACIELA CABANA; MARCELA MENDOZA; LINDSAY SMITH; HUGO DELFINO; CARLA MARTÍNEZ; BÁRBARA MAZZA; LORUHAMA TERUYA ROSSI; DI FABIO ROCA, FRANCISCO

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

Willey-Blackwell

Año: 2022 vol. 124 p. 479 - 489

0002-7294

Biocultural approaches in anthropology originated from a desire to dissolve the nature/culture divide that is entrenched in the discipline. Whereas biocultural approaches were born under the umbrella of medical anthropology, by the late 1990s, biology-centered approaches had been mostly taken up by human biologists in biological anthropology. It was at this point that biology-inclined approaches began to gel into an informal interdiscipline, biocultural anthropology. Much like any other discipline, biocultural anthropology developed research and professional norms with erected boundaries around acceptable work and workers. We draw from scholarly work in interdisciplinary studies to explore those norms and boundaries from the perspective of our collaborative, multi-method, and interdisciplinary project that combines "biology" and "culture" in unconventional ways. We provide examples of the obstacles, barriers, and risks we experienced, and the costs exacted on the research project and the researchers due to the nature of our boundary crossings. By exploring biocultural anthropology from the edges of acceptability, we expose the unacknowledged "boundary work" in contemporary biocultural anthropology and by extension in its parent discipline, anthropology.