The complex links between social structures and biological bodies are increasingly recognized. The field of epigenetics offers scientific evidence about the “biological embedding” of social experience – how environmental factors can be inscribed on the biological body. However, the social implications of epigenetics for race, class, and gender inequalities have to be addressed carefully. While ideas of embodiment are far from new and go back in the West to the Hippocratic treatise on Airs, Waters, and Places in the 5th/4th century BCE, modern biomedical views, and genetics in particular, have traditionally sidelined this ecological line of thought. It is at this level that the debates on biosocial models of health and disease or biological plasticity have attracted increasing interest and may become an important platform for cross-disciplinary collaborations across the social/natural science divide.