Bodily Betrayal: Love and Anger in the Time of Epigenetics

About the chapter

The chapter extends anthropological analyses of “alternative reproductive technologies” by examining how kinship systems are shaped through the continuous biological reproduction of feeding and eating. It focuses on the dilemmas faced by women in Xela, Guatemala.

Across the text, epigenetic discourses meet everyday feeding practices: ideas about inheritance and metabolism become part of how women read their own bodies, their appetites and their responsibilities toward kin.

Metabolic illness and changing food economies form the backdrop, alongside the quantitative health technologies that enter reproductive life and give numbers to bodies and to care.

The language of epigenetics often frames the body as a record of experience, where environmental stresses and nutritional histories become inscribed at a molecular level. Yet for many women, this framing can introduce a troubling sense of responsibility, as though every meal and every hardship leaves a permanent mark on future generations. Love and anger intertwine in these spaces, as caregiving and feeding practices become sites of both connection and anxiety. The body, rather than a neutral vessel, emerges as a contested terrain where kinship, food, and scientific discourse meet. Understanding these dynamics requires attending to the lived textures of everyday eating, where the intimate and the biological are never fully separable.

In communities where food is both scarce and symbolically dense, the act of feeding becomes a deeply relational practice. Epigenetic explanations risk translating structural conditions of poverty and violence into individual bodily failings, placing the weight of future health on women's choices. This shifts attention away from the broader systems that shape access to nourishment and care. Yet the women in these contexts are not passive recipients of scientific narratives; they reinterpret, resist, and weave epigenetic talk into their own understandings of kinship and survival. The body, in this view, is not betraying anyone. Rather, it is bearing witness to histories that demand collective, not individual, reckoning.

Epigenetics and women's understandings

How epigenetic discourses shape the way women in Xela make sense of food, bodies and what is passed on between generations.

Metabolic illness and food economies

Changing food economies and metabolic illness are treated together, as conditions of everyday life rather than as isolated clinical events.

Quantitative health technologies

The chapter examines the role of quantitative health technologies in reproduction, and what measurement does to relations of love and anger within families.