Based primarily on fieldwork conducted over one year in Beijing and Nanjing, two centers of scientific research and environmental activism in the People's Republic of China, my study explores the ways both scientists and social scientists envision and establish the relationship between exterior environmental problems and interior reproductive health concerns. I argue that during investigations into the quality and quantity of sperm in contemporary China, scientists both examine and produce toxic `environments' of exposure. Toxicologists find that their research subjects embody China's history of industrialism and rapid social change, which become investigable through genetic and epigenetic studies of sperm. Through interviews with faculty and graduate students at multiple universities, participant observation at reproductive toxicology laboratories, and interviews at environmental activist organizations, I explore the way experts and activists bring Chinese environments into being, and the way these environments are found to correlate with changes to reproductive health in China.

Reflections from fieldwork have been brought to questions of interest within anthropology more generally, including the definitions and relationships between nature and culture, the universal and particular, the individual and the collective, as well as the body and what stands outside it. Each chapter is concerned with how anthropologists today make sense of interiors and exteriors, content and context. I bring these concerns first and foremost to scientific practice, using the methodology of those I study as a guide for what an anthropology of sperm (and perhaps the body and illness) might look like. In particular, I argue that epigenetic studies of male infertility and birth defects use sperm-environment interaction as a means to understand the biological impact of social processes on the body. The infertility of a toxic Chinese environment, whether brought into being in the laboratory or conceptualized as a devastated national landscape, is understood as correlated with the infertility of male Chinese bodies. Scientists are, then, embracing an understanding of biosocial problems that transcend both biological causation and individual responsibility to enable a form of social critique that takes seriously the epistemological and ontological stakes of thinking environmentally across bodies, generations and domains.

Second, I bring these concerns of interiors/exteriors, content and context to questions of scientific translation, asking: how do scientific findings move between transnational, expert and disciplinary domains, even as these contexts (or environments) are brought into being through scientific practice? I argue that scientific practice in China today is effective at translating between domains because of, not in spite of, the toxicity and ambiguity of the environment. Toxicity allows science to proceed, even as reproductive toxicologists work to expose the damage that accompanies toxic exposure. Understood as multiplicity, the ambiguity of the environment benefits scientists, who meet multiple ethical and material research demands. The environment's ambiguity also facilitates an indirect environmental activism, which strives to evoke public attention toward environmental destruction through correlation, not causation. Here, the political stakes of correlative findings prove as if not more powerful than causative evidentiary claims.

Through the lens of Type 2 diabetes this dissertation considers race and problems of difference and risk with developments in treatment, genomic science, and the conduct of research and research priorities. Based primarily on fieldwork in New York and California, I interrogate public health notions of outreach with biotechnology and clinical research concepts of biomedical translation as synonymous practices. Institutional relationships and marketing drivers, I argue, reflect relatedness back onto the Type 2 diabetes patient through causal narratives of risk and inevitability. In effect, kinship--genetic, familial, racial, ethnic, and environmental--becomes the driver of both risk and emergent forms of bioliterary discipline. I present a narrative of how diabetic risk became racialized over time and how African Americans became seen as a desirable research population. Arguing against biological race, I present an ethnographic example of how one such African American population, or community, emerged from particular social and political histories. Fieldwork uncovered lingering memories of the Tuskegee Experiment combined with cultural incompetency in both public health and biotechnology sectors. Further, I consider the bioethical challenges of African (American) participation in new genomic research aimed toward reducing health disparities. However, as a racial category, genetics researchers debate the precise genetic location and definition of "Africa" in the human genome. I suggest that the search for a pathological Africa in the human genome may deepen racial stigmatization as well as author new narratives of difference. I submit that social disparity, not biological disparity, presents the ultimate challenge to successful effective clinical translation and public health outreach.

Pakistan has among the world’s lowest drug prices, and Western multinationals rarely apply for drug patents there. Yet, despite the absence of these quintessential barriers to access, Pakistanis confront some of the highest global burdens of treatable yet untreated diseases, perpetual shortages of lifesaving drugs, and an epidemic of unpalliated pain at the end of life due to morphine scarcity. This paradox, devastating in its consequences, lies at the heart of this dissertation.The dissertation argues that to understand the paradoxes of access in Pakistan, we must radically rethink the relationships between access and its determinants. Specifically, it demonstrates the counterintuitive relationship between access and price, showing how prices that are too low can deprive people of medicines; between access and intellectual property, showing how drug patents can exert powerful effects even in places where they do not exist—what I call “spectral property”; and between access and quality, demonstrating that despite the proliferation of several competing brands of the ‘same’ drug in Pakistani markets, these versions are in fact so different from one another that consumers cannot know what they are ingesting, and whether it will heal, further sicken, or kill them. The dissertation develops an analytic of ‘scandal’, departing from familiar tropes of crisis and state failure to voice an ethical-political critique of how specific instruments of global capitalism articulate with national regulatory and legal systems to hinder access in counterintuitive ways.

Through the lens of malaria control and eradication efforts, this dissertation considers the political nature of demarcating global health problems and the pursuit of evidence to support such framings. By attending to past international campaigns to eliminate malaria and shifts in the goals of international health as a whole, I investigate what is new about what some have called the “silver revolver” approach to global health governance: the deployment of simple, technologically-innovative tools to attack a disease from multiple angles through the support of public-private partnerships. Based on fieldwork with health workers, biologists, public health officials, and recipients of care in and around Dakar, Senegal and with designers and funders of malaria interventions in California, Switzerland, and Italy, my dissertation shows what counts as knowledge and who frames possible futures in global health research, design, implementation, and evaluation. I argue that talking about malaria means getting close to malaria or speaking from the proximity of malaria, as the ecologies that malaria produces and that produce malaria vary greatly on the parasite’s and its hosts’ historical, political, and socio-economic contexts. Speaking of malaria on a global scale – in a project of global control or global eradication – means creating and maintaining conceptual proximities through the discourse of a single, unified “malaria” (Kelly and Beisel 2012). Examining the central role of the informal in malaria treatment, practices of approximation in malaria diagnosis, and the space for political resistance in health data collection in Senegal, I argue that attention to conflicts over malarial knowledge and practices is in fact crucial to dreams of malaria eradication, as well as to a “more democratic and equitable” global health (Geissler 2011).

This dissertation examines how the rise of a genetic Cameroonian diaspora in the United States through genetic genealogy has become crucial to managing and transforming postcolonial sovereignty in Cameroon over the past decade. In 2010, 17 African countries celebrated 50 years of independence. Cameroon distinguished itself by marking the anniversary by inviting 54 DNA-identified African Americans of Cameroonian ancestry back “home.” This first genetic reconnection program would not be the last — neither in Cameroon nor in West Africa more broadly. As genetic ancestry takes on a new life beyond the American genetic genealogy industry, this project examines the ongoing problem of racialization through this technology as a problem of biocapital at a global scale. I consider the ways that genetic ancestry has catalyzed new modes of belonging beyond individualistic desires of American test-takers. The emergence of a genetic Cameroonian diaspora has enabled Cameroonians to repurpose the ambivalent relationship between the African American diaspora and Africa to recoup African Americans as a form of social capital. Through multi-scalar processes of disalienation, I argue that genetic reconnection programs create an ethic of sharing ancestry based on reciprocity. African Americans’ ability to be reunited with their genetically-identified ancestral homeland is authorized insofar as their return can be repurposed to simultaneously to reclaim the promise of independence that the postcolonial nation-building project has been unable to provide by ensuring those who share ancestry are invested in being dependable on and for each other. As this technology of the past is reoriented toward the future in Cameroon, the social, political, and economic pressures that genetic reconnection programs attempt to manage and that simultaneously set the limit for whether and how genetic reconnection’s utopian potential can come to fruition.

By conducting nearly two years of multi-sited ethnographic research and archival research in Washington, D.C. and Cameroon from 2010 to 2018, I use this dissertation to intervene in critical discussions on the 21st century biologization of race through insights drawn from feminist kinship studies, biological citizenship, and historical repair. In the postgenomic era, where ethics is the currency driving the value of genetic information, I showcase how the politics of life itself has less to do with genetic determinism than how life chances are being differentially defined so as to make DNA a final frontier for a viable life from the scale of the nation-state to intimate kin. Rather than reifying a genetically-determined ancestry in Africa, genetic reconnection between Cameroonians and African Americans is inextricably linked to a reconfiguration of postcolonial sovereignty where the racialized prospects of life are opened up anew. This, however, requires attention to Africa as a contemporary space where scientific knowledge production processes unfold, rather than an ahistorical place either captured by science or where science is applied. Genetic reconnection not only links the related, but distinct, racialized histories of colonialism and slavery binding African Americans and Cameroonians. It also illustrates how these histories are being reassembled under 21st century modes of empire that racialize in ways that are neither undermined nor replicated entirely by DNA alone.

This dissertation examines the production of the Bahama islands as a site for interrelated forms of field research, field education, and environmentally oriented tourist visitation. Recent developments in international climate science and politics have cast small islands as particularly vulnerable and susceptible to the threat of global warming and its planetary effects while the global economic crisis is blamed for the downturn in tourist arrival numbers to The Bahamas and for the ever-increasing cost of living in the archipelagic nation. As a result, redesigning the country's tourism product to compete in new travel markets has come to coincide with reconfiguring the country's energy, agricultural, and fishing industries under the sign of island sustainability. The very idea of what it means to be a nation of islands is in question, and the conditions of possibility therein are undergoing dramatic change.

The dissertation has three constitutive themes. First, it shows that recent events in The Bahamas bring into relief the continual reformulation of the experimental space of the Caribbean as field laboratory and site for knowledge production about human social evolution and economic reorganization. My attention to the emergent ecological milieu of islands in crisis highlights this history and the modes of inclusion and exclusion for bringing particular people and ideas of the social into more recent science-based problems. Second, focusing on the increased call for interdisciplinary, integrated environmental research in The Bahamas involving social science, I argue for revisiting the concept of biopolitics. This concept, historically rooted in 19th Century developments concerning the knowledge produced about and the governance of human bodies and populations, loses analytic purchase in an arena where the prefix, "bio," can be interpreted as signifying a scientific rearticulation of the problem and object of biological research in which the life processes of the human and the non-human become holistically co-constituted in particular ways. Finally, this dissertation engages with recent political ecology and scholarship on cultures of nature in order to describe contemporary ecological and conservation science as a nature making practice with political ramifications in The Bahamas, and to bring further attention to a concern for the scientific productions of nature and value within those fields.