Special Focus: Canguilhem’s Milieu Today

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.”

February 2019
Editors’ Introduction: As Adventurous as Life
Gabriel Coren and Cameron Brinitzer
The Life of the Milieu
Kathleen Stewart
A Living Room
Todd Meyers
Canguilhem’s Vital Social Medicine
Carlo Caduff
Le Vivant & Partial Pressure Milieus
Adriana Petryna
On the Odor of Rancid Butter, a Twenty-First Century Update
Hannah Landecker