Lauren Carruth, The Multispecies Sociality of Digestion and the Microbiopolitics of the Belly Among Somalis in Ethiopia
In a new article in Medical Anthropology, SIS Professor Lauren Carruth discusses the management of what Somalis call 鈥dacar鈥 鈥 translated as digestive bile, bitterness, aloe, and masses of tiny beings in the gut 鈥 which is key to popular health cultures and ethnophysiologies in eastern Ethiopia. Managing bodily聽dacar聽requires cultivating multispecies sociality and flows of life between humans, vegetation that nourishes livestock, and animals that produce milk consumed for therapeutic and nutritional properties.
Transcending Western scientific conceptualizations of the 鈥済ut microbiome鈥 and the instrumentalization of microbes to improve human health, Somalis鈥 gut epistemologies and concept of聽dacar聽provide an ecological perspective on the co-constructed, mutable, and multispecies nature of digestion and life itself.
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