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Annual Review of Anthropology

Volume 52, 2023

Biological Normalcy

  • Andrea S. Wiley1
  • Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 52:223-238 (Volume publication date October 2023)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on July 26, 2023
  • Copyright © 2023 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information

Abstract

Contesting ideas about what is “normal” human behavior or biology is a core contribution of anthropology. In efforts to provide more inclusive views of what it means to be human, anthropologists challenge judgments about diverse ways of being, which include assumptions about what it means to be normal. Meanings of the term normal encompass the descriptive (statistical) and the evaluative (normative), i.e., judgments about a given characteristic. In biomedicine, “healthy” is often the value ascribed to normal, but embedded in healthy are biases that derive from particular cultural and historical contexts. Here I review how the term normal is understood and used in anthropological and related studies of human biology and biological variation. I propose the biological normalcy framework for understanding how the statistical and normative meanings of normal mutually inform each other and their consequences for human population biology. Several examples provide illustrations of the framework.

Keyword(s): cultural norms, human biology, normal, normative views, statistics, variation
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2023-10-23
2025-06-13
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Biological Normalcy
Annual Review of Anthropology 52, 223 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-090632
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-090632
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-090632
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