Microbial Kin: Relations of Environment and Time

Microbiome science considers human beings supraorganisms: single ecological units made up of symbiotic assemblages of human cells and microorganisms. Microbes co-evolve with humans, and microbial populations in human bodies are determined by environments/exposures including family, food and place, health care, race and gender inequities, and toxic pollution. Microbiomes are transgenerational links, disarrangements between different bodies and the outside world. This article asserts that microbes are kin—kin that are made of and making environments, across generations. Post/nonhuman theories have debated the agency, sociality, and ontologies of microbes and things like microbes, all the while appropriating and eliding Indigenous scholarship that directly address the nonhuman world. Microbial kin evokes Indigenous formulations that necessitate reciprocal, ethical accountability to more-than-human relations. This article uses fieldwork in a transnational microbiome malnutrition project in Bangladesh to explore what develops for both the biological and social sciences if we call human–microbe relations kinships, and call microbes our kin.