ABSTRACT
The distinction between biology and culture became a twentieth-century consensus view as a result of the influential article ‘The Superorganic’ by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber in 1917. The article established a neat distinction between what operates at the organic level and what is instead in the transcendental realm of culture or ‘civilization’. After reviewing how this argument came to be seen as ‘natural’ to many, I discuss its problematization in the present postgenomic moment. Notions like inscription, embodiment, embedment, nature-culture, and entanglement are part of an emerging conceptual repertoire that today destabilizes Kroeber’s dichotomy of biological versus social causation.
