Common body: a non-anthropocentric approach to the unavoidable convergences between human and planetary health

• Grant number: 23/11689-1
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Young Investigators Grants
• Start date: March 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2030
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Marisol Marini
• Grantee: Marisol Marini
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Saúde Pública (FSP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Gabriela Marques Di Giulio ; Joana Cabral de Oliveira ; José Miguel Nieto Olivar ; Renzo Romano Taddei
• Associated scholarship(s): 25/05442-9 - BETWEEN COLONIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL FRACTURES: THINKING ABOUT COLONIALITY AND MULTISPECIFIC RELATIONS BASED ON LITHIUM MINERAL EXTRACTIVISM IN THE JEQUITINHONHA VALLEY-MG, BP.IC; 25/04082-9 - Correlation between increased temperature and occurrence of chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs), BP.JP

Abstract

This project aims to map and analyze emerging propositions that have produced or enabled innovations in the conceptualization and management of transformations, death and dying, and that are umbilically related to the reconceptualization of life and the limits of the human as a universal, individual and autonomous entity. The purpose is to compose new imaginaries and possibilities of understanding and interventions that goes beyond anthropocentric conceptions, non-emancipatory and colonized by the imaginary instituted by the life sciences, biomedicine and biotechnologies of death as failure. To this end, among the empirical cases contemplated here are studies on: the human microbiota and its roles; the impoverishment of the microbiota in certain geographies and situations; imbalance of the microbiota in patients with advanced heart failure, transplanted and with implants of circulatory assistance devices; evidence of the increase in the incidence of heart disease and mortality due to climate change. These objects have as common ground the impertinent link between human and planetary health, which challenges reductionist and anthropocentric strategies in health care and promotion. We suggest that the binary understanding between life and death is at the root of the salvationist solutions proposed to address health and ecological problems. Supported by ethnographic research and grounded in approaches from the Anthropology of Science and Technology, the proposal aims to establish interlocutions and collaborations with emerging fields of research, such as: queer studies on death, which shed light on the limits of understanding life and death in binary terms; medical and ecological humanities, which articulate critical ecological studies and medical humanities. With this, the project will allow the creation of a research line in Anthropology of Science - an approach that does not yet exist in the Faculty of Public Health, University of São Paulo. The line will institutionalize the development of an ethnographic, intersectional and multidisciplinary perspective, focusing on the convergence between human and planetary health, in the processes of transformation, death and dying. In addition to the research area, the project proposes the creation of a multidisciplinary nucleus of studies, the Laboratory of composition of the sciences of transformations (provisional name). (AU)