Microbes and Fieldwork: Reflections Toward a (Micro)Biosocial Anthropology

Relations with microbes—especially the pathogens that cause infectious diseases–affect the methods and products of ethnographic field research in multiple ways, both corporeal and conceptual. In work with Indigenous people and their histories, Western medicine and germ theory have been linchpins of epistemological divides between ethnographers and traditional communities. The author’s longterm fieldwork in Indigenous communities in western Brazil offers a case study in how an ethnographer’s concerns, assumptions, and intellectual blind spots about microbes can constrain research both practically and interpretively. As scientific perspectives emerging in microbiology and other life sciences cast new light on Indigenous perspectives and practices, which ethnographers have treated as purely socio-cultural constructions, Indigenous scholars and health activists are pointing the way toward more integrated perspectives that challenge anthropologists to expand their work beyond disciplinary divides between semiotic and biomaterial perspectives. This opens possibilities to look both backward–to reanalyse aspects of old ethnographies–and forward, toward more comprehensive biosocial understanding of Indigenous ideas, practices, and historical agency.