A Comparative Study on Social Constellation of Bodily Substances in a Globalized World

Keywords

Substance,Relatedness,Biosociality

Objectives

Bodily substance in the field of anthropology has mainly been studied based on kinship studies. The discussions about the folk theory of reproduction relating to cultural diversity in the concept of reproduction and the relatedness of people who are not limited to biological reproduction were particularly conducted to critically overcome the kinship studies premised on dualism in the natural/cultural or biological/social dimension. However, substance is nowadays traded and distributed as a resource at the forefront of the phenomena of the development in science technology and medical science, the global economic market and the increased transnational movement, acquiring new importance that goes beyond the range of kinship studies. The way that new substance such as genes and genomes affects the formation of identities of individuals, families and groups as well as what a society should be like is being discussed from the viewpoint of biosociality centering on medical anthropology.
　
This research aims to comprehensively understand the social dynamism surrounding substance in the time of globalization through a comparative study on the social constellation of substance in Oceania, Asia and Europe, and also aims to present an approach that can mediate the studies on substance polarized by the kinship studies and medical anthropology.

Research Results

This inter-university research project lasted three and a half years (although it was temporarily suspended for one year in between). By examining ethnographic cases and previous research, we provisionally redefined the concept of “substance”—a word that has been truly polysemous within and outside the field of anthropology—as a “bodily component that brings reality to the connection between individuals and groups,” and identified approaches to develop a framework for an anthropology of substance that incorporates each project member’s research, as follows.
The first approach is the genealogical study of substance. The word “substance,” whose roots can be traced back to Greek philosophy (ousia in Greek and substantia in Latin), implies something that is unchanging and permanent, like an essence, and differs greatly from the modality of substance depicted in ethnographic studies of non-Western societies. We confirmed the need to incorporate a historical-analytical perspective—which could be called a “genealogy of substance”—into the study of substance, which has been referred to polysemously without conceptual examination in previous research. The second is substance theory that originated in new kinship research which began in the 1980s. This is in a sense the basis for an anthropology of substance. It incorporates the perspectives of constructiveness and process into the traditional anthropological research themes of kinship and personality, and relativizes the boundary between nature and culture. In this research project, we defined a dynamics-based perspective called “substancization,” in which substance is substance within a specific context, in contrast to the previous view of substance in which the tendency was to consider substance as something distinctive to the local community, by examining the processes of naturalization (and collapse) of social relations in a variety of areas with ethnographic methods. The third is substance studies, which views substance as a resource, focusing more on materiality. This approach looks at the interaction and appearance of bodily components in globalizing capitalist economies, and includes fields such as the political economics of substance, population studies that look at the formation of boundaries between races and ethnic groups, and fetish studies. We explored the possibilities of new ways to approach information and knowledge that have become more and more difficult to ignore in contemporary society, such as genetic and biometric authentication information.
We depicted the areas where these three approaches overlap as the social configuration of substance, and defined the scope of an anthropology of substance.