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3 - An Embodied Materialist Sociology

from Part I - Theory in Environmental Sociology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2020

Katharine Legun
Affiliation:
Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands
Julie C. Keller
Affiliation:
University of Rhode Island
Michael Carolan
Affiliation:
Colorado State University
Michael M. Bell
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

The essay outlines the emergence of 20th-century environmental sociology from within a discipline built on eurocentric masculinist presuppositions. The instrumental hegemony of 'humanity over nature' and its corollary in the capitalist division of labour disconnect people from their ground in natural processes, such that society and ecology become accepted as distinct ontological spheres. Salleh proposes a new lens, based on an understanding of embodied-nature. She argues that an embodied materialist epistemology can transcend the dualism, creating a sociology that supports democratic and ecologically sustainable outcomes.Salleh highlights regenerative labour skills, which apply a relational logic while maintaining community and protecting the biophysical infrastructure of global capital itself. Excluded from circuits of exchange value and independent of use value, this 'gifting' meta-industrial class provides metabolic-value, the integral basis of any society-nature metabolism. Salleh closes with an overview of how the epistemic communities that dominate contemporary environmental sociology articulate nature, and how they could benefit from an embodied materialist perspective.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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