Canguilhem’s historical epistemology continues to inspire historians and anthropologists to attend to how current and former human practices of science shape our conceptualizations and engagement with natural and experimental environments, non-human beings, and human life. Now, with the publication of a translation of La connaissance de la vie ([1965] 2008), which contains many of Canguilhem’s key works, “The Living and Milieu” speaks with new urgency.[ In the spirit of the History of Anthropology Newsletter’s call for multidisciplinary exploration of novel topographies for the history of anthropology, this Special Focus Section gathers five insightful considerations of reversals and collapses in relations between organism and environment for the history of human and life sciences since their seminal characterization in “The Living and Its Milieu.”

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Authors
Cameron Brinitzer: contributions / cbrinitzer@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de / Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Carlo Caduff: contributions / carlo.caduff@kcl.ac.uk / King’s College London
Gabriel Coren: contributions / website / gabriel.coren@berkeley.edu / Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
Hannah Landecker: contributions / landecker@soc.ucla.edu / UCLA
Todd Meyers: contributions / tem3@nyu.edu / NYU Shanghai
Adriana Petryna: contributions / petryna@sas.upenn.edu / University of Pennsylvania
Kathleen Stewart: contributions / kstewart@austin.utexas.edu / The University of Texas at Austin