Elizabeth Shove: Thanks for joining us in a discussion of practice theory and change. Rather than talking about the topic in general we’d like to focus on one of your articles, ‘Epigenetics and Obesity: The Reproduction of Habitus through Intracellular and Social Environments’ (Warin et al. 2016). For us, this piece is important because it is about how human bodies carry and transform practices from one generation to the next.

Using the case of obesity science, you resist long-standing divides between biology/culture and objectivist/subjectivist approaches in social and medical sciences and propose a way of overcoming these dualities. You do so by suggesting that Bourdieu’s concept of habitus can be extended to help explain the transmission of obesity. By linking the concept of biohabitus to epigenetics and introducing the Deleuzian metaphor of the fold, you argue for an understanding of biological and social processes that cuts through traditional distinctions and allows us to understand how biological and social processes interact over space and time.

Manuel Baeriswyl: Our first question is this: What led you to write this article?

Megan Warin: It was published in 2016 with colleagues, and I'd been researching obesity for some time. I'm a social anthropologist, social/medical anthropologist, and I'd been engaged in lots of critiques around the medicalisation and pathologisation of larger bodies and of obesity, particularly concerning the ways in which women were represented and blamed in these discourses (Warin et al. 2008; 2012). A lot of these early critiques were coming from the social sciences, scholars like Gard and Wright (2005) or Guthman (2011), as you might expect. But I got to a point where I felt there were some limitations to my analysis and these critiques, and they were, overall, very anti-biology. I wrote about some of these limits in a 2015 paper (Warin 2015), starting to question the limits of representational critiques and the implications of sidelining materiality.

And you know, there are lots of competing fields – in the Bourdieusian sense - that critique what was commonly referred to as the obesity epidemic. There are critical fat studies, critical dietetic voices such as Lucy Aphramor (2005), at the time some emerging ethnographic studies like Emily Yates-Doerr’s The Weight of Obesity (2015), and many social constructionist views about the medicalisation of obesity. Along with Gard (2011), I characterised these critiques, including mine, as being sceptical, very sceptical about clinical discourse and medicalisation. I agree that the discourses about obesity which surfaced around the beginning of the 2000s were alarmist, presenting people who were overweight or obese as metaphors of tides and floods or time bombs. These interpretations come with all sorts of negative moral judgments and sometimes with dire consequences that fed into harmful discourses of mother blame, and we should continue to push back and critique these negative and stigmatising discourses, of course.

But when I started to map out these fields, I could see people fighting for different types of authority; arguing along binary lines that separated bodies between their biological processes and discursive representations. I've been to quite a few fat studies conferences and social science conferences where people would be talking about these social constructionist standpoints and positions. But I was also curious to discover how people might be talking about their own experiences in the lunch break or tea breaks, for example, how they calibrated that disjuncture between this very strong social critique and their own experiences of embodiment (which sometimes relied heavily on medical explanations and interventions). So, on the one hand, critique was performative in fat studies spaces, and at other times the power of thinness and medical authority was not questioned at all. These are some of the limitations I was interested in, especially this inability to engage with the multiplicities of obesity and fatness (as Mol (2002) might say), to incorporate biology (let alone the limits of body/fat positivity that Elspeth Probyn (2008) pre-empted in her early work).

There was this lovely, I think it was an opinion piece in Nature in about 2012 (Nature Editorial Group, 2012) which talked about the ways in which different disciplines in the Life Sciences and Social Sciences are stuck in different silos. I was quite struck that this was in a Nature journal and that the authors were saying that we need to ‘bury the hatchet and cooperate’. So, I thought: “Well... is this an opportunity that is growing?”

Because I was collaborating with life course scientists at the time, I would talk to them about some of my frustrations around the social constructionist views of obesity. And it was through, and in collaboration with my colleagues in Public Health, Epidemiology and Life Sciences that I was introduced to this concept of DOHaD, which is an acronym for Developmental Origins of Health and Disease.^{^[2]}

I was intrigued by this because I was asked to come in as an anthropologist to do some ethnographic research on women’s experiences of obesity, so I started reading some of the epidemiological work and public health work around DOHaD. DOHaD is a theory which was advanced by a UK epidemiologist and physician, Dr. David Barker.^{^[3]} He theorised that chronic disease, adult chronic disease, originated at least in part in utero, in the womb, because of what they call insults or adverse intrauterine assaults or conditions. These were exposures to things like poor working conditions, poor living conditions, poor maternal nutrition, and stress, trauma and famine. He argued that these changed fetal physiology in utero and increased the risk of adult chronic disease. So, in David Barker's work especially, things like cardiovascular disease, diabetes or hypertension were (partly) attributed to what was originally known as fetal programming.

I was working with another anthropologist (Tanya Zivkovic) at the time, and we were initially alarmed because we thought this approach was biologically determinist; that what a mother ate during pregnancy could determine, to some extent, the likelihood of risk of chronic disease in later life for that child. Our research on the public discourses of this hypothesis confirmed these determinist readings, particularly singling out women and mothers for their perceived lack of care (both biological and social) of their bodies – pregnant bodies - and that of their children (Warin et al. 2012). But the more we read and the more we talked to our colleagues involved in that field, we realised that David Barker positioned DOHaD in a social determinants of health framing.

In fact, he was very interested in the context of women's lives and how to support and improve their lives. Questions about how the biological and social were working together got us very excited, and I began to think about the possibility of having some genuine collaboration with my colleagues in Epidemiology and Life Sciences. Unfortunately, we found that the broader structural violences and contexts have become squeezed out of Barker’s hypothesis (Warin et al. 2011), and other feminist scholars – like Sarah Richardson, Natali Valdez, Martine Lappe, and Becky Mansfield have also taken up those arguments about the reproduction of racism and gendered violence in DOHaD, epigenetics, and obstetric care.

This relationship between environments, bodies and change was very interesting to me, and it really helped me to think beyond the limits of social constructionism. It allowed me to think about biology and how ... the classic line, I guess, is ‘how the environment gets under our skin’ – environments are of course not simply outside bodies; they are intrauterine environments too, so the concept of environment needed to be expanded, which Aryn Martin and I wrote about (Warin and Martin 2018). I was also beginning to research epigenetics – and how nutritional or environmental epigenetics was identifying molecular mechanisms of change beyond epidemiological correlations - and there was a surge in theoretical thinking from feminist work, histories of science, and science and technology studies that was similarly looking for alternate frameworks that did not reproduce the separate worlds of biology and culture. Early conversations with many people, including Vivienne Moore, Michael Davies, Maurizio Meloni, Stephanie Lloyd, Hannah Landecker, Stanley Ulijaszek, and Aryn Martyn were all instrumental in my engagement with postgenomic models of biology.

Elizabeth Shove: This is really useful background, and it helps make sense of some of the threads and histories that come together in your article. One of the reasons we chose this work is that it represents a groundbreaking mixture of biology and social theory, focused on questions of change over time.

On the one hand, there are the simple narratives of evolutionary biology, and then there are all kinds of other social theories of change which you dip into, including Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Bourdieu is also writing about concepts of transfer, inheritance, and inter-generational change, so what does the blending of biology and social theory add? Could you tell us a bit more about your notion of biohabitus and change?

Megan Warin: The concept of biohabitus, at one level, is a theoretical probe or tool which allows me to collaborate and to have meaningful conversations, not only with my academic colleagues, but to think about policies and practices in relation to obesity.

In Australia, they keep rolling out the same interventions around obesity, which relate to individual bodies and lifestyle behaviours. ‘Eat less and exercise more’ has been such a common mantra over so many decades now that there's been no attention to the ways in which bodies are positioned in time and place and space, and the relational interactions and practices of everyday doings. There hasn't been a theory which health promotion has been able to latch on to that accommodates differing food and eating practices, and not fall back into universal and decontextualised directives. Ideas about the social determinants of health more broadly - which have very strong and powerful advocates backing them (like Sir David Marmot) - have not had a lot of political traction on the ground either, which is interesting.

In behavioural models, there is a shared understanding of people as empty vessels; they just need to be educated. It is as if you have a vase and you fill it up with water. The idea, or rather, the misconception is that people are just ignorant and don't know how to look after themselves or feed their families. If we just educate them about the ‘proper’ way to eat, things will be fine! So, I am always looking for new ways of conceptualising and theorising what might help my colleagues in Public Health and in nutrition and dietetics do things differently. From our ethnographic work, we had very firm data on the social practices that were shaped by people’s gender, ages, social class, ethnicity and so on, and how these all profoundly influenced food tastes and choices – their habitus – but this was overlooked in the large obesity interventions that we were examining (Warin and Zivkovic 2019). Not to mention how differing people experience their bodies in relation to their habitus, where larger bodies are not always viewed as ‘obese’, and thin bodies can be viewed as ‘sick’ or the result of illicit drug use (Zivkovic and Warin 2018).

In this context, the concept of biohabitus supports new ways of intervening in some of those very enduring, very conservative health promotion programs which have been shown to fail time and time again. It’s important to think through the ways in which social practices are embodied, and the gendered and classed ways in which these differing habitus interact with biological processes. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, like DOHaD and epigenetics, isn’t static or deterministic, but flexible, open and adaptable to change.

Manuel Baeriswyl: As you explained in the paper, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus helps us talk about the transmission of advantages and disadvantages over generations. We were wondering: is your version of biohabitus doing the same?

Megan Warin: I think it depends on the time scale you're looking at. With the literature on developmental origins and epigenetics, the time scales are intergenerational, so across grandparents, parents and children. Within those fields those are the time scales involved.

The beauty about blending Bourdieu’s understanding of cultural reproduction, and my interest in the biology of reproduction, is that these strands – the social and the biological aspects of reproduction - come together. All of these different structures, practices, and enactments around food, eating, and bodies are so entangled that they simply shouldn’t be separated.

Elizabeth Shove: Just to follow up on that a bit, and to go back to the question of time scales, the relation between grandparents, parents and children is repeated and repeated and repeated, over time. Everybody has got grandparents, and many people have children, and in theory generations stretch back, back to the Neolithic period and before, and of course the dietary world: the food, what's eaten, the systems of provision, are different in each generation and location.

This might be beyond the scope of what you're interested in, but I think the implications of your argument about biohabitus could be extended further in time, so the focus is not only on present policymaking. Have other people read that in your work and is that something that you're interested to explore?

Megan Warin: No, I think that is outside my scope, but there are others, for example, physical anthropologists who do that sort of work. They would be looking at things like teeth, for example, from which you can begin to reconstruct patterns of diet and so forth. But I think because my work is ethnographic, that is why I concentrate on the narratives which people construct concerning kinship, relations, memories of food and eating, and the everyday practices surrounding these.

There is a whole field of physical anthropology which would be interested in those sorts of issues, and a lot of the epigeneticists look at ancient DNA, so yes, they do consider change over very long time scales.

Manuel Baeriswyl: Reading your article again, you used the metaphor of a Russian doll. Could you tell us more about that?

Megan Warin: Yes, the Russian doll is an important visual. It is used in a lot of highly gendered representations of DOHaD and epigenetics, and it captures the idea of bodies being inside each other, which is one way of getting beyond binary ways of thinking about self and other, or self and society. That's what DOHaD did and is what nutritional epigenetics does; both ask us to think about how we are part of our environments, and these environments are both within and outside bodies. Of course, there are different ways of understanding what the environment is, but if we are thinking about social and maternal environments, trends in food and eating and environmental conditions, famine, pesticides, chemicals and so forth … in that sense temporality is not linear - what happens in the past is also part of the present. Hence that popular presentation of DOHaD and nutritional epigenetics as ‘you are what your grandmother ate’. In this schema, the past is brought into the present and into the future all at the same time, through intrauterine and social environments. So, a conventionally linear view of change over time collapses.

I think what is distinctive about DOHaD and epigenetics is the way they deal with the commingling of temporalities, place, and spaces. Of course, the Russian doll metaphor doesn't represent the geographical setting, which we also need to attend to, in terms of things like exposures during pregnancy and early life – you know, pollution or traumas or even things like plastics, and all the social practices that surround these. But I think that sense, that idea of bodies being in each other – which we can also see in some of Marilyn Strathern’s early work in Melanesia (1988) – is really amenable to the ways in which bodies are conceptualised beyond Western Cartesian thinking.

Manuel Baeriswyl: I’d like to go a bit further on this topic. In the paper you refer to Deleuze’s philosophy of folding and you represent biohabitus as a series of folds. As you have already explained, it is important to recognise the effect of the past, but what does the language of fold and folding add?

Megan Warin: In that paper, I was using the Deleuzian concept of the fold to really speak back to protein folding in epigenetic processes. It is a key process in epigenetics, and my audiences are often either life scientists, epigeneticists, or social scientists. I’m always trying to create metaphors that help me talk to different audiences, so it was really just a literal hijacking, if you want, of that idea about protein folding. Of course, I am using folding in a different way: as a metaphor to conceptualise what Barad might call the intra-activity of bodies, materialities, and worlds across time, space, and generations at both these molecular and structural levels.

Elizabeth Shove: I’d like to change track a bit. One of the intriguing issues, especially for theories of practice, is the world of the body, and of invisible microbes and micro processes that can't be seen with the naked eye. Does the concept of biohabitus bring these micro-materialities to practice theory and to an understanding of change?

Megan Warin: Well, I think Hannah Landecker’s^{^[4]} work is really valuable here as she establishes the grounds by which food eaten by pregnant women can affect the very systems that metabolise food in the fetus, leaving an imprint on a dynamic bodily process (2011). I think unless you have some openness to Life Sciences and Social Sciences, it can be quite difficult to make those connections, but in the reading which I do around epigenetics and obesity, it is interesting to see how epigeneticists and some DOHaD scientists are talking about molecular processes within bodies, and the long chains or nets, as Landecker calls them, across time and space that reach in and out of the body. They are giving agency to that matter, and that's why ‘new materialism’ is important for me. Life scientists are starting to use this language to describe interactions between bodies and environments and the porosity of the body. This is important for ideas about the agency of bodies and how social and biological processes are enfolded into bodies through food and eating and via the panoply of everyday cultural practices that relate to diets, patterns of consumption, and relationality. So, for me that thinking about change in relation to biohabitus is a way of thinking more broadly about how we might conceptualise these dynamic and porous processes beyond Enlightenment ways of thinking, and outside of established silos.

Approaches rooted in DOHaD and epigenetics make a lot of sense, but in the Social Sciences or in Feminist STS, and for me, it's not just about putting the body and the environment together – because we've sort of been there before, especially in debates about the socio biological. I’m interested in taking this further and in asking ‘how can we think differently’ and that's where someone like Karen Barad's (2007) work comes to consider the intra-actions that generate forms of entanglement, of what she calls spacetimematterings. So, it's another way of thinking.

Elizabeth Shove: You're working in Australia, you're doing ethnographic work, which is quite spatially bound, but there seem to be international trends in obesity. Are arguments about world diets and change of interest to you?

Megan Warin: Yes… I'm not an epidemiologist, but to understand those sorts of trends I would come back to the question of what partnerships can anthropologists have with epidemiologists (and others) in thinking about what Margaret Lock calls local biologies (Lock 1994; Niewohner and Lock 2018).^{^[5]} So you really need a sense of what is happening on the ground, you need contextual information to inform biological data, you need to know about the fine-grained everyday social practices and relations which are so important for understanding what is going on. Elizabeth Roberts’ work in Mexico City and her concept of ‘bioethnography’ is a great example (2017; 2019). If she hadn’t conducted ethnographic work in households in very impoverished neighbourhoods, we might not have learnt about the contaminated foods that were served on highly prized plates that were handed down through matrilineal lines – and glazed in lead. So, you need to attend to all of those social practices which impact food and eating and obesity and are situated in global capitalist systems and food systems; you need to attend to gender and social class and how these practices of everyday life are being embodied in households.

Elizabeth Shove: We’ve talked about what it means to study global processes given that they are always made of local situations, but there are a few more questions on our list, including questions about the changing cultural significance of the body.

Manuel Baeriswyl: This is hopefully not too speculative for you, but we are interested in the cultural significance of body mass, and in how obesity is conceptualised. For example, Vigarello (2013) suggests that in medieval Europe, being heavy was a sign of wealth and the ability to afford food and so forth. He goes on to describe changes in warfare and the advantages of being slim in order to ride horses into combat. Does the concept of biohabitus help us think about these sorts of changes?

Megan Warin: Maybe, but you could also apply all sorts of other theoretical tools to think about cultural changes over time. So perhaps biohabitus is not, you know, it would be difficult to go back in time and do the sort of fine-grained ethnographic work that habitus requires, which I think you really need to really understand biohabitus in those massive time scales.

Elizabeth Shove: Thanks. It is good to think about the methodological limits, but are there other issues that the concept of biohabitus brings to the field that we haven't we haven't talked about?

Megan Warin: I think interdisciplinarity is absolutely key. Established traditions can only get us so far in addressing really complex issues. There are hugely different cultural understandings of what bodies are, different ontologies and epistemologies, for example in Indigenous science, including ideas about bodies being in one another – and those bodies can be other persons, spirit or animal beings, or other times and places.

As I said already, ways of thinking about multiple bodies and times and spaces and, you know, post-human ideas about relationships with environments, these are key to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. So yes, there are very different ways of thinking about being in the world, including the ways in which epigenetics – as a form of biohabitus - is being used to present ongoing intergenerational trauma from settler colonial violences, and I have written about this with colleagues (Warin et al. 2020; 2023). I think there's a lot of scope for concepts of biohabitus to be considered in different cultural settings (with local knowledge and theories) and used to think about these space-time matterings.

Manuel Baeriswyl:
I was wondering what your take on the notion of biohabitus would be in a post-human, beyond species context, in relation to the notion of change?

Megan Warin: I think part of the challenge is to develop theoretical tools which can be used in different disciplines. There is some excellent ethnographic work from Anna Tsing^{^[6]} or Sophie Chao (2022), for example, which argues that we could be broadening our concepts of bodies and environments to multispecies assemblages and not just capturing them within very siloed ways of thinking. So yes, I think there are really important avenues that we could be taking into the life sciences.

There is also quite an issue around the lack of theory. For example, in public health promotion, it seems to be, and I put it in quotation marks, ‘common sense’ that people just need to be educated and that they need more information. Sometimes I feel disheartened that policies, strategies, and research agendas don't change because funders fall back into neoliberal discourses of individual bodies and lifestyles and blaming people. This seems very simplistic, but it means that there is little or no attention paid to social practices or the social determinants of health that impact our everyday habitus.

Elizabeth Shove:
You mean there is a dominant paradigm?

Megan Warin: Yes.

Elizabeth Shove
That's great. That's another way of thinking about change. We’ll leave it there.

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[1] Corresponding author – contact: manuel.baeriswyl@usi.ch

[2] This is an approach to medical research factors involved in diseases in humans’ early life development.

[3] Dr. Barker was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London for his work on “fetal programming”.

[4] Hannah L. Landecker is a sociologist and an historian of Science and Technology Studies at UCLA.

[5] Margaret Lock coined the concept of "local biologies" to describe how subjective embodied experiences of the body are shaped by historical, social, cultural, and political contexts, rather than being solely determined by universal biological factors.

[6] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is an Anthropologist and Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.