Body Matters

1. Relevant for multiple disciplines - Anthropology, archaeology, history, cultural studies, environmental studies, human geography 2. Ethnographically, archaeologically and historically rich content 3. Uses a novel approach to materials and human relationships with the environment, which is gaining ground in academia (aka, the material turn) 4. Offers a new method for thinking about people as connected to the material world 5. Challenges human exceptionalism 6. Apposite for current global conditions (e.g.: the Age of the Anthropocene).

Adopting a novel cross-disciplinary approach, this book demonstrates the value of understanding human bodies as fundamentally influenced and affected by the other materials available in diverse landscapes. Using a rich mix of ethnographic, archaeological and historical examples, it explores the creative roles materials have taken in shaping past aBody Matters approaches the material world directly; it seeks to remind people that they are the matter of their bodies. This volume offers an assortment of contributions from anthropology, archaeology and medieval studies, with case studies from northern Europe, the Near East, East Africa and Amazonia, which variously draw attention to the multiple shifting materials that comprise, impact upon and co-create human bodies. This lively collection foregrounds myriad material influences interacting with and shaping the human body; the chapters come together to illustrate the fundamental fleshy, bony, suppurating, leaky and oozing physicality of being human. Ultimately, by reminding readers of their indisputable materiality, Body Matters seeks to draw people and the rest of the material world together to illustrate that bodies not only seep into (and are part of) the landscape, but equally that people and the material world are inextricably co-constitutive.