CRASSH

While muscular bodies are bounded by their skin, metabolic bodies have semi-permeable boundaries. They maintain their integrity by absorbing food (solid and fluid) from the outside and by excreting into this outside what is excessive to them. But what belongs to the ‘body’ and what to the ‘environment’? And when exactly does food become body and body become waste?

There are several boundaries at stake.

First, there is the spatial dividing line between inside and outside. Is this in the throat, passed when food is being swallowed, or in the lining of the bowels, transgressed when food is being absorbed? And does urine leave the body in the kidneys, or in the pubic area?

Second, there is a functional boundary between self and other. Where does the eater begin? Are intestinal bacteria, crucial to the human body’s ability to digest its food, part of the body ‘itself’ or do they remain strangers? And what about blood glucose: does this belong to the body’s energy supply, or not quite, as its functionality depends on the presence of insulin?

The third boundary, finally, is the most difficult to trace: it runs between external causes and internal motivations for bodily events. That bodies eat, might follow on from smells, images and other external causes that drive them to do so. But as gathering, growing and/or buying food, let alone preparing it, is a lot of work, it may also be that eating is internally motivated. How might the boundary between external and internal activation best be drawn?

To answer these questions I will present some stories of bodies in practice. I hope that they may help to elucidate what doing boundaries makes of our bodies as we engage in the transubstantiation that occurs when we eat and excrete.

Annemarie Mol's work interferes with the theoretical repertoires of the social sciences. Her main interests are the human body and the materiality of social life. What are the methods and terms that might help to better incorporate these into social (or socio-material) theories? With this question as background she has worked on a variety of empirical topics. Her book The Body Multiple (Duke University Press, 2002) presents a detailed ethnographic description of hospital practices, in which 'the body' figures as an 'actor enacted' that takes on a variety of shapes in a variety of practices. In The Logic of Care (Routledge, 2008), Mol talks about the process of knowing and intervening in bodies. She argues that the notion of 'doctoring' fits care work better than that of 'control'. This is not only because bodies are erratic, but also, as Mol demonstrates, because the technologies involved are unpredictable. In collaboration with others she has worked on these and related topics, and publications from this work include Differences in Medicine (edited with Marc Berg, Duke University Press 1998) and Complexities (edited with John Law, Duke University Press 2002) 

In a series of articles that mobilise metaphors such as 'network', 'fluid' and 'semi-permeable boundaries', Mol has raised questions about how things (water pumps, viruses) and practices (measuring, diagnosing) travel from the global north to the south and vice versa. (Exemplary here is 'The Zimbabwe Bush Pump. Mechanics of a Fluid Technology', co-authored with Marianne de Laet.) Currently Mol's research is on food. Food is both biological and social, but it is also and simultaneously intimate and global. Studying the socio-material practices of food offers new insights into how people around the world are joined and separated. And while in the Western tradition 'action' has primarily been theorised as manipulation, a matter of eye-hand coordination, Mol seeks to explore what happens if we theorise 'the actor' as if it (she, he) were an eater.

Presently, Annemarie Mol is a Socrates Professor of Social Theory, Humanism and Materialities at the University of Amsterdam. Earlier, she was a Socrates Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Twente and a senior researcher on a variety of externally financed projects. Prior to that, she worked as a postdoc at the University of Maastricht and Utrecht University and as a junior researcher at the University of Groningen. She studied in Utrecht and Paris. Since 2006 Mol has been a member of the Social Science Council of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). For The Body Multiple she received the Ludwig Fleck Prize and the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize.