Cultures of Fermentation: Living with Microbes

Recent discoveries on the importance of microbes for human biology, health, and culture, the rise of antimicrobial resistance, and developing technological advancements necessitate new dialogues about human relationships with microbes. Long perceptible only through their transformations—from epidemic disease to alcoholic beverages—it is now possible to more fully perceive the diversity of ways in which we influence and are influenced by microbes and to understand that human and microbial cultures are fundamentally intertwined. In the introduction to this supplement, we outline the current state of the art of an “anthropology of microbes” in three subfields of anthropology: biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology. Moreover, as a result of dialogues borne out of the symposium associated with this issue, and now reflected in the articles themselves, we discuss the interactions between and within the subfields of anthropology. This supplement is committed to the development of a common language for an emerging anthropology of microbes, and in order to shape genuine transdisciplinarity we argue for the continued necessity of “trading zone” points of intersection—such as the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s symposium “Cultures of Fermentation.”