Toward a relational materiality of soils: Introduction

As environmental matters, soils have been an object of inquiry primarily for the natural sciences, with social scientists and environmental humanities scholars occupied with the surface dramas of territory and its products. The invisibility of soils in much of public and intellectual life speaks not only to the literal invisibility of their subterranean elements but also to their taken-for-granted effectiveness as the material infrastructure of societies. Today’s crisis of soil ecosystems calls for an urgent examination and improvement of human-soil relations. This is both an intellectual and a practical project. The authors believe that a crucial first step toward more just and sustainable human-soil relations is a critical reflection around soil knowledge practices and their onto-political effects. In this introduction, they open the field for such reflection by denaturalizing the category soil, discussing its complex materialities, its multiple scales, and the diversity of existing soil ontologies and epistemologies. In so doing they argue for a relational materiality approach to the study of soils. The authors place this relational materiality approach within a practical, political, and ethical project of re-embedding societies in soils and lands. Finally, they indicate emerging arenas of inquiry where a relational materiality approach to soils is needed.