ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses anthropological literature on risk and recent work in linguistic anthropology that emphasizes scaling as a semiotic process in order to think through some of the conceptual questions which have emerged from calls for a renewed biosocial or biocultural agenda in the human sciences. It argues that while environmental epigenetics research has the potential to profoundly complicate the relationship between "the biological" and "the social", and between "genes" and "environment", at least some of this potential for complexity is contained through researchers' use of scale. Research at the McGill Group for Suicide Studies (MGSS) is built around the "molecular conduit" model in which the epigenome acts as the "interface" between environmental inputs and genetic pathways linked to risk of suicide. In MGSS models, specific forms of differential methylation are seen as being both specific effects of early child adversity and as factors associated with increased suicide risk.
