Abstract
Inflammation has risen to the forefront of biomedical research into many chronic diseases prevalent in industrialized countries, including mental, metabolic, and postviral conditions. For sociologists, the rise of inflammation in explanatory models of chronic disease is an opportunity to grasp a historical shift in thinking about how society gets under the skin as new modes of conceptualization of the relationship between societies and bodies emerge in this domain. Highlighting two historical conjunctures between epidemiology and molecular biology concerning hormones and fat, this paper thereby contrasts an older cybernetic model of the social as a signal transduced via the brain and hormonal signaling system to become a biological accretion of stress or adversity with an explanatory trajectory centered on chronic inflammation. Rather than transducing the social environment, the inflammatory body emerging from the studies of adiposity and diabetes is produced by metabolizing material and psychosocial conditions. Inequalities in the social world are thereby reflected as inflammatory states that exist upstream of, not downstream to, the kinds of social signals previously deemed important to health and health disparities. Signals still matter, but they are not their own key determinant in terms of action or impact—that is a contextual matter within the chronicity of the processual metabolic life of a cellular and bodily milieu.
Zusammenfassung
Entzündungsprozesse sind in den Vordergrund der biomedizinischen Forschung zu vielen chronischen Krankheiten gerückt, die in den industrialisierten Ländern verbreitet sind, darunter psychische, metabolische und postvirale Erkrankungen. Eine Betrachtung dieser Entwicklung ermöglicht der Soziologie, während der Entstehung neuer Konzepte zum Verhältnis von Gesellschaften und Körpern einen historischen Wandel im Verständnis darüber zu erfassen, wie Gesellschaft „unter die Haut“ geht. Indem zwei historische Zusammenhänge zwischen der Epidemiologie und Molekularbiologie in Bezug auf Hormone und Fett hervorgehoben werden, kontrastiert dieser Beitrag ein älteres kybernetisches Modell des Sozialen als Signal, das über das Gehirn und hormonelle System transduziert wird und schließlich in einer biologischen Akkumulation von Stress oder Widrigkeiten mündet, mit einem auf chronische Entzündungsprozesse fokussierten Erklärungsansatz. Diesem neuen Konzept zufolge, das in der Forschung zu Adipositas und Diabetes zum Vorschein kommt, wandelt der entzündliche Körper nicht die soziale Umwelt um, sondern dieser entsteht durch das Metabolisieren materieller und psychosozialer Bedingungen. Ungleichheiten in der sozialen Welt spiegeln sich daher als entzündliche Zustände wider, die vor und nicht hinter den bisher für Gesundheit und Gesundheitsunterschiede als wichtig erachteten sozialen Signalen liegen. Signale sind nach wie vor wichtig, aber sie sind nicht die entscheidende Determinante für ihre Wirkung oder ihren Einfluss – das ist eine kontextuelle Angelegenheit innerhalb der Chronizität des prozessualen metabolischen Lebens eines zellulären und körperlichen Milieus.
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Thanks to Aaron Panofsky, Stefan Timmermans, Robbin Jeffries Hein, and Lieba Faier for their generous reading of earlier iterations of the manuscript. The author gratefully acknowledges the support and intellectual community of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Future of Flourishing Program.
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Landecker, H. How the Social Gets Under the Skin: From the Social as Signal to Society as a Metabolic Milieu. Köln Z Soziol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-024-00951-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-024-00951-5