What is Bio-Enculturated?

To be bio-enculturated is to exist as an inseparable weave of the biological and the cultural, where neither domain stands alone nor acts in isolation. The term signals a profound entanglement: our bodies, habits, desires, and even our sense of self are not simply given by biology or shaped by culture, but are co-produced in a living, ongoing process. We are not biological beings later draped in culture, nor are we cultural agents riding atop a biological substrate. Instead, we are always already bio-enculturated—formed in, through, and as the loops of soma and society, matter and meaning, flesh and form.

“The biological, bodily and the social are not separate levels “but processes linked in a spiralling interweaving at three temporal scales: the long-term phylogenenetic (we inherit a plastic capacity for living in interdependent niches), the mid-term ontogenetic (we develop our embodied capacities as we are embedded in practices), and the short-term behavioral (as developed bodies politic we act and react to our material and semiotic encounters)”. (John Protevi)

Bio-enculturation names the condition where the biological (our bodies, brains, nervous systems) and the cultural (our languages, practices, technologies, values) are so deeply interwoven that they cannot be separated without distortion. This is not a layering of one atop the other, but a dynamic, recursive process: our bodies are shaped by cultural practices from birth, while those practices themselves emerge from and reshape the living bodies that enact them. We are “of things, not in them”—participants in a cosha (a biosocial something) that is always in the making as it makes us.

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See also: Traits, Configuration