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Over the past several decades, one important growing trend in critical biocultural studies of health has been a stronger engagement with ethnographic methods. The degree to which recent biocultural health studies work to integrate ethnography with biological indicators such as blood spots and other biomarkers makes connections between the biological and social worlds ever more legible (Hoke 2020; Sweet et al. 2018; Tallman 2018). A number of sociocultural medical anthropologists have employed the uses of similar biomarkers and situated their work in biocultural frameworks (Jernigan 2018; Mendenhall 2019; Oths 1998; Seligman 2014; Weaver 2018). Among others, Singer et al. (2017), Singer (2020), and Mendenhall (2019) have led the way in developing syndemics as a biosocial concept important to public health and medical sciences as well as medical anthropology.

Some of the more richly ethnographically grounded studies draw heavily on the use of narrative and meaning to breathe life into otherwise disembodied data of lived experience. For example, Lesley Jo Weaver’s Sugar and Tension (2018) is an ethnographic study of women in North India around the stresses of managing diabetes. Along with Emily Mendenhall’s recent book Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty and HIV, they provide a road map for richly ethnographic critical biocultural studies. Mendenhall effectively connects the lived experience of structural violence and poverty to the syndemic interactions of diabetes and other health problems (e.g., HIV/AIDS and depression) across a number of global contexts (from Delhi, Nairobi, and Soweto to Chicago); and does so in large part by analytically connecting the hard edges of social worlds to the very personal experience of these worlds.

As well, Kasey Jernigan (2018) has developed an embodied heritage approach in work on obesity with the Choctaw of Oklahoma that brings “meaning making” into a critical biocultural approach. She situates the bodies, biology, social life, and cultural identity of Choctaw today within the historical traumas of the past, ranging from the Trail of Tears, broken treaties and loss of food and land sovereignty, forced assimilation through residential schools, and government-run food distribution programs. Jernigan links traumas of the past to meanings of Choctaw identity in the present, including the complex understanding of large bodies and related health outcomes. These are just three examples among others that illustrate the power and potential of bringing to the forefront analyses of the feelings, thoughts, emotions, concerns, and anxieties of lived experience into biocultural frameworks tying structural inequalities to biology and health.

Critical biocultural anthropologists have also begun to ask questions about the biosocial consequences of social issues such as the culture of capitalism as in the work of Elizabeth Sweet and colleagues (2018) on debt and “embodied neoliberalism,” and Hoke and Boen’s (2020) recent research into the health effects of eviction. Taking up subjects of debt, eviction, addiction, incarceration, and homelessness are obvious topics for which a critical biocultural approach might offer insights. These will become ever more critical in upcoming years as a product of profound inequalities and pandemic effects.

The community-based work (HEAT: Health Equity Alliance of Tallahassee) of Gravlee, community organizers, colleagues, and students in Tallahassee, that of Ravenscroft and Schell (2015) on environmental pollutants in partnership with the Mohawk, and Galloway and coworkers’ (Fafard-St. Germain et al. 2019; Galloway et al. 2020) research on food insecurity and on cancer experiences in partnership with Inuit communities, all point to the value and critical need for more community-engaged and participatory biocultural work. Studies such as these might hopefully be the rule rather than the exception in the future.

These examples illustrate trends in critical biocultural studies of health and illness toward expanding engagement with social theory, and expanding the breadth of questions and contexts of biocultural analysis with an eye toward addressing important issues of social justice. We imagine and expect further engagement with other theories and problems within the areas of biosociality, biological citizenship, and biocommunicability (Briggs 2003, 2016; Briggs and Nichter 2009; Franklin and McKinnon eds. 2001; Petryna 2005; Rabinow 1996; Rose and Novas 2005), that have emerged over the past several decades as important within medical anthropology. For example, advocacy around specific diseases based on biological citizenship is increasingly common and is part of the terrain of scientific research. Such acts of biological citizenship would seem to provide particularly rich avenues for critical biocultural research; research that demands a thorough knowledge and integration of biology and culture. Critical biocultural approaches might also draw on biocommunicability – the production, circulation, and reception of (biomedical) knowledge – that has been proposed as central to an anthropology of epidemics (Briggs and Nichter 2009), and to two moving ethnographies by Briggs and Mantini-Briggs (2003, 2016) that forcefully link the biopolitics of the production and flow of information to the emergence and spread of epidemics and unequal exposures, treatments, and human suffering. The stark inequities exposed by the current COVID-19 pandemic, the efforts to control, limit, and otherwise obscure or confuse the information the public receives, and the divided response to public health efforts, makes the biocommunicability around epidemics all the more relevant and urgent; and of obvious import to any future work on this and other pandemics by critical biocultural medical anthropologists.