Biological Normalcy

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. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 52 is October 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.