The Multispecies Sociality of Digestion and the Microbiopolitics of the Belly Among Somalis in Ethiopia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Management of what Somalis call “dacar” – translated as digestive bile, bitterness, aloe, and masses of tiny beings in the gut – is key to popular health cultures and ethnophysiologies in eastern Ethiopia. Managing bodily dacar requires cultivating multispecies sociality and flows of life between humans, vegetation that nourishes livestock, and animals that produce milk consumed for therapeutic and nutritional properties. Transcending Western scientific conceptualizations of the “gut microbiome” and the instrumentalization of microbes to improve human health, Somalis’ gut epistemologies and concept of dacar provide an ecological perspective on the co-constructed, mutable, and multispecies nature of digestion and life itself.