Re-animating soils

Transforming human-soil affections through science, culture and community

Bibliographic Data

ID3439205
AuthorsMaria Puig De La Bellacasa (University of Warwick, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume67
Issue2
Pages391-407
Publication date2019-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0038026119830601
OpenAlexW2919722046
LanguageEN
Citations received62
References cited23

In a sense we are unique moist packages of animated soil'. These are the alluring words of Francis D. Hole, a professor of soil science renowned for encouraging love for the soil and understanding of its vital importance. Affirming humans as being soil entangles them in substantial commonness. This article explores how altering the imaginaries of soils as inert matter subjected to human use and re-animating the life within them is transforming contemporary human-soil affections by developing a sense of shared aliveness. Presenting research on current practices, material involvements and stories emerging from scientific accounts, community involvements and artistic manifestations, I propose five emerging motifs of renewed imaginaries of soil's aliveness that feed into each other to affirm intimate entanglements of human-soil matter. I argue that while a vision of anthropocenic soils invokes yet another objectified natural resource brought to exhaustion by a deadly human-centred productionist ethos, as soils are re-animated and enlivened, a sense of human-soil entangled and intimate interdependency is intensified. These new involvements with soil's aliveness open up a sense of earthy connectedness that animates and re-affects material worlds and a sense of more than human community in those involved

Aesthetics · Art · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Ethos · Interdependence · Political science · Sense of place · Social science · Sociology · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Philosophy