ArticleSociological review monograph2016
From boundary-work to boundary object: how biology left and re-entered the social sciences.
Article in Sociological review monograph, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rethinking governance of synthetic cells.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2026Article
- The Maternal Capital Hypothesis: Giving Mothers Central Place in Evolutionary Perspectives on Developmental Plasticity and Health.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Review
- Contextual Exceptionalism After Death: An Information Ethics Approach to Post-Mortem Privacy in Health Data Research.Science and engineering ethics · 2022Article
- Digging the channels of inheritance: On how to distinguish between cultural and biological inheritance.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Epigenetics, ethics, law and society: A multidisciplinary review of descriptive, instrumental, dialectical and reflexive analyses.Social studies of science · 2019Review
- Social structures, power and resistance in monist sociology: (New) materialist insights.Journal of sociology (Melbourne, Vic.) · 2018Article
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Abstract
In an archaeological spirit this paper comes back to a founding event in the construction of the twentieth-century episteme, the moment at which the life- and the social sciences parted ways and intense boundary-work was carried out on the biology/society border, with significant benefits for both sides. Galton and Weismann for biology, and Alfred Kroeber for anthropology delimit this founding moment and I argue, expanding on an existing body of historical scholarship, for an implicit convergence of their views. After this excavation, I look at recent developments in the life sciences, which I have named the 'social turn' in biology (Meloni, 2014), and in particular at epigenetics with its promise to destabilize the social/biological border. I claim here that today a different account of 'the biological' to that established during the Galton-Kroeber period is emerging. Rather than being used to support a form of boundary-work, biology has become a boundary object that crosses previously erected barriers, allowing different research communities to draw from it.
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