Our Bodies and Our Histories of Technology and the Environment

Joy Parr

A key self-help text of second wave feminism, Our Bodies, Ourselves,[1] increased readers’ awareness of their bodies, and of the influences of their bodies on how they lived daily and how they understood themselves. What I will argue here, with some theory and some examples from work in the history of technology and the environment, is that we, as students and researchers in the histories of technologies and environments, similarly have much to gain by attending more closely to bodies. They are a fundamental connection between the people whose histories we read and write and the physical form of their tools and places where they live, work and play. Katherine Hayles, in two 1995 essays in environmental history collections,[2] made the case for a more ‘embodied’ historical practice, but historians then were in the thrall of the ‘linguistic turn,’ exploring how discourse made and held meanings. Amidst the enthusiasm for Foucault, Derrida, and Latour, and celebration of the many useful insights we might borrow from literary scholars, her contribution was not nourished nor taken up widely by others in our field. It is time to try again, -- not to turn our backs on the representations of tools and places in language, -- but to open interpretive space in which to study the robust materiality of technologies and environments, to encounter them as directly and fleshly as possible, rather than as they are codified symbolically as language. How might we do this, and why?

How?

I used the unusual word “fleshly” on purpose to focus attention on the body as a way of knowing. Humans know the world by interacting with it. What they know about it and how they organize and reason with that knowledge is “marked by the particularities of our circumstances as embodied human creatures.”[3] What are these particularities? Some of these we can assume persist over long stretches of history and across cultures.[4] Humans stand upright and are a certain distance above the ground when they crouch or sit to rest. They walk and run within a certain range of speeds and can reach to touch within a certain distance. Within a certain range, they can retain their balance while moving on slopes and shifting ground. These we could group as proprioception, the sense of bodily knowing in space; kinesthetics, the gait, pace and posture with which the moving body encounters its surroundings; and proxemics,[5] the emotional comfort with nearness and distance. Some of these change with the life cycle and over time. A child’s sense of ‘too high’ is different from an adult’s; the medieval sense of ‘close quarters’ in a dwelling was different from yours and mine. Some are altered by contemporary technologies. Think of the difference in ‘an hour away’ to a walker, a cyclist, and an air traveller, or of ‘clean enough for comfort’ in a household with a washing machine rather than a scrub-board, or a vacuum cleaner rather than a broom.[6] Much of the bodily knowledge that comes from interactions with the world is not readily captured in words. Michael Polanyi called it ‘tacit knowledge,’[7] what ‘we know but cannot tell.’ Pierre Bourdieu called it ‘habitus’ following on the work of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Mark Hansen calls it ‘experiential excess,’[8] excess because while it is securely held in bodily experience it eludes expression through language. In 1992, the eminent environmental historian, William Cronon made a disheartened attempt[9] to make the ‘linguistic turn’ in his own work. Respectful though he was of his literary colleagues’ insights, he found so much tacit knowledge and experiential excess in the world he wanted to know that he concluded that the narrative form was ‘dangerous’ for his purposes. The ecological senses of non-linearity and randomness which were the focus of his attention, by their nature were synthetic rather than categorical. In their way of being, they were fluxes and fusions which the strict linear progression of words, what he called the ‘rhetorical razor’ of discourse and narrative, could not adequately convey.

These sensuous ways of interacting with the world are best distinguished as phenomenological or corporal embodiments.[10] By their resistance to communication in words, the parts of technologies and environments accessible through these senses were those most marginalized by the methodological turn to discourse analysis. Because they are so central to the processes of dwelling and work, it is hard not to agree with Cronon, that bringing them into the foreground of environmental history and the history of technology should be a priority.

Many of the senses which come more readily to conscious mind -- sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell –- in our time are readily expressed in words. Sight and hearing are the ways humans interact most externally with the world and thus the most readily verifiable, and amenable to the standards of empirical testing and replication which scientists prefer. Comparatively it is relatively easy to agree that we are seeing or hearing the same thing as the person beside us. They are also the senses cultural critics and science studies scholars are most likely to borrow as they search for bodily metaphors to express socially constructed institutions of knowledge. Think of how panopticon is used to convey power to monitor in many dimensions, or resonance to suggest the diffuse meanings which emerge from a source. This is epistemological embodiment as a figure of speech, or epistemological embodiment, and the way in which the term embodiment has been most commonly used by those practiced in the linguistic turn. Be careful, however, when you read ‘embodiment’ to sort out which of these the author intends, for embodiment employed as a figure of speech, (epistemological embodiment), the epistemological usage is a less capacious concept than the corporeal for those of us who are seeking ways to find out about technologies and environments materially and directly rather than depending on metaphors. Bodily encounters with technologies and environments occur profoundly through the internal senses of taste, touch, and smell, the senses Barbara Duden separates out as knowledge held “beneath the skin,” and those Elaine Scarry, in her studies of pain, characterizes as “resisting representation.”[11] These senses, with propriception, kinaesethetics, and proxemics, are less welcome by scientists seeking evidence and by science studies scholars seeking conceptual analogies specifically because they resist representation and simplification in symbols and models. Physicians in the early modern period, participants in the making of science of their time, shifted from using internal to external signs of illness in their diagnoses and came to less often ask their patients ‘how are you,’ meaning what can you yourself sense changes inside your body, and more often assert ‘I can see how you are.’ This change was radically elaborated in the twentieth century. Diagnosis by physical examinations which used touch (through palpitation), smell, and hearing (through stethoscopes) became less central than electronic apparatus which yielded graphic output which practitioners can see and compare.[12]

But these scientific and science studies simplifications that attend most to the external senses and set aside bodily knowledge, favoring instead models and ungrounded theory, have come at some cost. For those of us seeking to know the full complexity of the relationships between humans, their environments, and technologies, these discarded material manifestations through the body are indispensable. For us they are not ‘experiential excess’ but key to what we need to know about human interactions with their tools and with their physical settings.

The processes of corporeal embodiment have histories. The senses have been tuned over time to bring to human bodies different qualities as human interactions with environments and technologies have changed. The most commonly cited example is the presence of moveable type, which made people more dependent on their eyes and, as they became less reliant on their ears, less practiced listeners. [13] Because the senses have been retuned by human experience with technology and the environment, treating the differences between them as separate, distinct, and persistent over time would be a mistake.[14] Thus, the leading practitioner in the history of the senses, Alain Corbin, after elegant monographs on odor and sound, turned to integrated studies of the sensing self in time and place.[15] He wrote ecologically about the full-bodied experiences of nineteenth-century people with the sea-side and embarked upon a multi-sensory project to follow Louis-François Pinagot, a nineteenth-century craftsman,[16] through the ‘natural and social landscapes’ he inhabited, emphasizing not difference but synaesthesia, the qualitative commonalities and shared conduits of the sensing body. Recovering these different ways of recognizing and organizing knowledge of the world, the accumulation of specific actions in specific places,[17] can be particularly valuable to us as students of the relationships among people, technologies, and environments. To do so, we must pay attention to the ‘complex specificity of human bodies,’ in themselves researchable legacies of sensation, ‘not merely products of discourse or objects of institutionalized power.’[18]

The next part of the ‘how’ is to create more robustly material histories of technologies and environments. After we have become aware, 1) that bodily interactions with the world include deeply unconsciously embodied senses such as proprioception, kinaesthesia, and proxemics organised by the size and capabilities of human skeletons and musculature, 2) that the five senses--sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell--differ in how readily they can be expressed in words, and 3)that historically they are refined by technologies and activities, we need to find a more encompassing way to characterize the complex flow of embodied knowing from these experiential interactions. Katherine Hayles built upon the insights of the Chilean cognitive psychologist Humberto Maturana, who before her had emphasized that ‘the processes involved in our activities’ constitute our knowledge, and recommended attending to the particular ‘relational and operational spaces’ of living systems as material matters of doing, rather than separating sensations, perceptions, and cognitions.[19] Hayles characterizes the bodily registering of interaction with the world beyond the skin as a ‘flux.’[20]

If you have been following my argument so far, you will understand why she characterizes this flux as commonly constrained by the physical form into which human bodies have evolved, by the angle and acuteness of human vision, the speed of human pace, and the places and practices those we study have experienced. Hayles’s rendering is that we have awareness ‘before conscious thought forms.’[21] Those who have taken courses in the social construction of gender, sex, and race will recognize a stark departure here. Rather than postulating that meaning precedes experience,[22] and that humans know the world through the meanings they share symbolically in language, Maturana, Hayles, and others you are likely to encounter, Paul Connerton, Francisco Varela, and Pierre Bordieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty whom I noted earlier,[23] suggest that humans ‘make sense’[24] of the world, for our immediate shared purposes, of technologies and environments, directly through their sensing bodies. By storing the consistencies in this awareness, humans become habituated to their habitats, comfortable as practiced users of their tools,[25] and share what they have learned directly, by imitating one another. In this sense, humans are not first language bearers, but to use Varela’s term, embodied minds.[26]

Why

If I have been doing my job well, you now have some understanding of why we as readers and writers of environmental history and the history of technology have much to gain by attending to how bodies learn and reason about their habitats and tools. Embodied perspectives allow us to tap into more of the knowledge humans have and more about the reasoning they employ as they use technologies in the places where they dwell, work, and play. Their tacit knowledge, Donald Harper calls this ‘working knowledge’[27] in his fine study of a skilled Saab automobile mechanic in upstate New York, is key to capturing the complexly intermingled texture of human experiences interacting with technologies. Similarly humans’ sense of place, how they come to feel at home and sense danger, how they adapt so as to be competent moving through the environment and attuned to changes there, comes from the processes of corporeal embodiment. These are the ecological senses William Cronon recognized were being marginalized by the ‘rhetorical razor’ of the linguistic turn.

Science and technology proceed ‘hand in hand’ –- this I hope you will now recognize as a use of embodiment as a figure of speech ,epistemological embodiment –- but they are not the same. As readers and researchers in environmental history and the history of technology we have much to learn from hydrology and metallurgy, from biochemistry and soil science. But many of the simplifications these disciplines employ to design empirically verifiable experiments and to transmit their findings through theories derogate knowledge and reasoning not readily represented in symbols and signs. Thus these practices set aside too much of the robust materiality humans learn from direct bodily interaction with environments and technologies. To reclaim a more complete understanding of these common and profound parts of human experience with technologies and environments, we need to open interpretive and analytical space for the corporeally embodied knowledge which resists representation in language. My argument is that our environmental histories and our histories of technologies will be more rich, complex, nuanced, and useful if we do.

The next part of the ‘why’ is about an absence that the reader may already have suspected. William Cronon’s 1992 concerns about the ‘rhetorical razor’ have prompted caution among environmental historians employing discourse analysis. Adam Rome, in one of his last writings as editor of Environmental History, urged more attention to research on the senses as ways of knowing the environment.[28] Two recent articles in that journal, one by Peter Coates, a contributor to this collection,[29] and one of my own,[30] are evidence of some opening up to work that attends to corporeal embodiment. But the scholars who have done the most cogent thinking about the processes of corporeal embodiment, to my mind, Hayles and Hansen, have not explored its historical manifestations. Hayles even castigated Hansen, in her foreword to his first book, for the ‘remarkable absence of particular technologies used either as examples or as occasions for analytical exploration’ there.[31]

Isabel Hull, a historian of Germany and a former editor of the American Historical Review, writing in 1995, argued that the knowledge and reasoning I have been calling here corporeal embodiment, was particularly amenable to exploration by “self-reflexive, scrupulous historicism,”[32] and suggested that by following the practices of the historian’s craft we can reclaim these important but recently marginalized elements of human experience. The second part of the “why,” then, is that we as historians are particularly well equipped with the closely textured integrating and contextualizing conventions of our craft to open up this interpretive terrain for our own purposes and to set an example for our colleagues in environmental and technology studies who might usefully emulate our practices. And so, the theory despatched, let us turn to some particularly revealing examples from the recent literature that focus upon corporeally embodied experiences with technologies and environments for what they can reveal.

Some Heuristic Examples

For the sense of safety, corporeal embodied knowledge is particularly important. True, people in the last century learned how to be safe at home, work, and play by reading manuals. Governments and firms developed occupational health and safety documentation for many workplace processes, and manufacturers provided instruction booklets to accompany the domestic appliances and home gardening equipment they sold. These were textual ways, at work for employees to augment their shop floor knowledge, and at home for novice users to protect themselves from injury in their houses and yards. But this participation in what discourse scholars call ‘interpretive communities’ was not sufficient protection against hazards.

Keeping safe, at root, is a matter of tuned bodily practice. Especially in risky environments, made dangerous by the presence of potentially toxic technologies,[33] well honed, unconsciously held reflexes are key to human safety. These responses to warning sensations, to be effective, must be embodied and automatic.

Barbara Allen describes the embodied knowledge of place of families who had lived along the Mississippi since their great grandparents were emancipated from slavery. These places had been altered in their grandparents’ time by the advent of oil refineries, petrochemical plants, and aluminium smelters. They understood the land as ‘constitutive of who they’ were, and knew their survival depended upon practiced physical proficiency traversing the landscape to escape. These were their bodily legacies of persistence. When alarms in the night signalled a chemical leak, a gas release, or an imminent explosion, safety depended upon residents’ intimate visceral knowledge of the night landscape sensed under foot. By following the route, copying the gait and carriage of a leader, staying upright and moving forward, they practiced a bodily tactic, using embodied knowledge to resist a bodily threat.[34]

Some embodied knowledges are particular adaptations to specific bodily work histories and the corollary occupational demands on households. If learning an occupation is in part the development of reflexes which tame industrial hazards into definable threats, rhythm of the work day and the work year requires emotional and logistical accommodations of families. The households of workers develop an emotional compass honed to flexibly, or at least stoically, accommodate dad being away, or mom being on night shift. These habits, skills, senses of comfort or dis-ease make re-compositions of household variously supportable or unsustainable. They can be material influences of moment in histories of technological change even as they elude the ‘human resource’ evaluations of credentials.

Miriam Wright found that planners for the modern offshore fishery in Newfoundland sought out young men from communities where the household-based inshore salted fishery was in decline. They expected that the high levels of literacy, specifically the ability to learn from technical manuals, and familiarity with the pace of factory work, governed by clock time, found in these communities would be key to trainees’ successful transition to the trawlers of the new industrialized frozen fish sector. But, Wright discovered, if their book-learning was an advantage, the senses of self these men embodied as workers and father/husbands made them unsuitable candidates for the technologies and environments of the new offshore fishery. The workplace dangers they had learned to handle were the proximal threats of inshore waters, of near rocks and winds deflecting around a ragged coast. The hazards of the open seas of the offshore challenged their proxemics, more unconsciously than consciously held, and their learned sense of appropriate spatial scale in their work environment. Moving from the inshore to the offshore meant exchanging the comfortably near for the threateningly far and entrained a fundamental rupture in their embodied sense of space.

These sources of unease were amplified by the stresses upon the gender and household division of labor caused by men being away for weeks at a time. The workers who fit readily into the new industry were older Banksmen, men who often had less schooling, but were long accustomed to working offshore on the high seas, and who came from communities long adapted to absence of menfolk for weeks at a time. These men recognized themselves in the relational and operational spaces of the offshore fishery; their wives had been raised in traditions which managed the boundaries of psychological, physical, and intimate space so as to accommodate the departure and return of adult males. It was these customary, often unconsciously held embodied affordances, key to manly and womanly competence, which distinguished former inshore fishermen from former Banksman, and their families too, as differently adapted to the new industrial environment.[35]

Thomas Csordas has called sensuous tuning ‘modes of somatic attention,’[36] like the inshore fishers’ assimilation of the winds and currents of the coast and the offshore fishers’ adaptations to the routines of the trawlers and to the storms of the high seas. Raymond Smilor[37] finds that humans who moved from rural areas into towns also were beset initially by sensuous challenges. The countryman who, in order to live off the land, had mastered a quiet finely honed discernment of bird and animal life, and a refined awareness of subtle changes in the sky and the shifting winds, was overwhelmed by the sensuous barrage of the city. Rural migrants adapted to the city by developing sensory calluses, in effect physical habits of inattention, in order to bear hub-bub and satisfactorily function amidst the surrounding roar. These new, and higher, bodily tolerances for the noise, stench, dirt, and shadow of congested neighborhoods were gradually learned ‘shifts in perception,’ adaptations to losses made acceptable by the promise of material gain. In the technological and ideological regimes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this sensory re-habituation was codified in regulatory regimes which set down the tolerances of a ‘person of ordinary sensibilities’ as the standard. Such municipal and state initiatives were recognitions that citizens had honed differing habituated sensitivities. If diverse populations were to work, live, and play together in closer quarters than the countryside, such a median sensuous standard needed to be defined. Once these standards were established, land use zoning was implemented to cluster spatially activities that posed similar sensory challenges. Additionally, acknowledging that the bodily assaults and pleasures of urban life were varied and that the money-making or pleasure-seeking of some might unreasonably discomfit the ‘ordinary sensibilities’ of others, municipalities developed scales of fines based on rankings of how loud, stinky, or dirty activities were, by comparison to what a reasonable citizen should be obliged to bear within urban boundaries.

In our own time of personal sound technologies, money can buffer these differing embodied tolerances. Those who want loud music can clamp speakers directly onto their ears, and those who want silence can choose noise-cancelling earphones against the rising sounds and developing deafness of their neighbours. But declining air quality and rises in global temperatures are different. These pose sensory challenges to the embodied routines and post-industrial quality of life expectations for which we will have to turn to social, regulatory solutions rather than to individual remedies.

Technologies too form and frame the sensuous flux which flows through bodies. Virginia Scharff has written widely and with spirited panache about how access to automobile technology changed human senses of the western American states from places to be into places to pass through. She makes us feel the differential impact that access to transport made in the lives of women and men, in how of the places registered at speed, from the seat of the car, perhaps with the radio on. Then she parks and shifts focus and scale. If being in the vehicle gave female drivers access to more places, Scharff notes, being fashion conscious about foot wear and underwear technologies constrained how they moved and how they breathed, intimately reordering their perceptions of distance and slope, of the surface beneath their soles, of what they could bend to reach, what a flirtatious impulse exposed and what modesty forbid.[38]

Isaac Asimov argued that if the automobile had not been invented, modern life would be far more different than if Einstein had not articulated the theory of relativity.[39] Scharff’s work gives texture and force to his contentions. We make sense of our habitat through the sensations our technologies and actions allow at least as much as through conceptual frames, symbols, and signs. By contrast with Scharff’s women drivers in the American west, consider what walkers learn about their environment. To amplify the contrast, imagine a walker who is not wearing a Walkman©.

There are two fine books about the history of walking which I recommend,[40] but my own research may also help make the point. To make room for the St. Lawrence Seaway, eight colonial hamlets were relocated back from the St Lawrence River, designed and re-settled as three modern villages. Almost everyone with whom I spoke in the new village of Iroquois claimed that the nineteenth-century settlement they left in 1958 was more interesting than the modern streetscape of crescents and cul-de-sacs, the plaza, and open parkland planners designed for them a mile north, beyond the reach of the flood. People walked in the old village; in the new village they drove. Can I know then, whether there was less texture and variety in the modern town than in the Loyalist village they had left, or whether a change in the technologies through which they moved about the new place separated them from the sensuous contact which would have made their daily lives there varied? I think this is a good question for an historian to ask, especially for those of us interested in environments and technologies. It is a bigger query than our customary historiographical questions, for it goes beyond analysis of the content of the discursive form, and the message in the medium of the technologies we use,[41] to take the full-bodied sensation of being in and moving through place, mirroring the scale and qualities of the location, as direct experiential evidence of the content of cognition and structure of reasoning.

Consider how a road system surveyed upon a square grid, might function as another technology constraining bodily encounters with the environment. Travelers by these roads meet the place through its property relations. Their route follows not the topography but the road allowances, not the most breath-taking nor the safest route, but the route least likely to prompt charges of trespass. Whereas the crow flies, the stream flows, and the wind blows in movements responsive to the lay of the land, travelers respecting private property cannot follow either the shortest or the least physically demanding route. They move, not in bodily reciprocity with the landscape, but along a path that minimizes their intrusion upon the rights of property owners.[42] Perhaps they learn more of the township from their journey along the surveyed road allowances than an air traveler passing through an O’Hare terminal learns of Chicago; perhaps the person transiting through O’Hare is merely more conscious of the technologies that bring the world from beyond the skin into human bodily understanding of near and far, fast and slow, hostile and homely.

If movement from the nearby countryside leads inhabitants re-settling in town to develop sensory carapaces, literally hardened sensory shells to armor themselves against the assaults of their new habitat, people leaving home to cross continents and oceans find their knowing and being in place assaulted in at least as many dimensions. Studies of migration, and resettlement, at their best, as in the work of Linda Nash, recapture the ‘sense of physical vulnerability’ of newcomers struggling with a somewhere they have had not yet viscerally embodied, where familiar habits do not serve and accumulated tacit knowledge cannot connect. In the case of late nineteenth-century California, Nash argues, European Americans felt so out of place, so unable to resolve the discrepancies between the natural order they had known and the ‘nature of things’ where they now were, that the pioneer imperative ‘to conquer nature’ was incomprehensible. This was territory to be discerned and then ‘completed,’ which could only be imitated rather than remade.[43]

Sometimes, as Thomas Dunlap finds in studies of British settlers in Australia at about the same time, populations ‘could not even think what they wanted,’ so disparate was the place where their bodies were from the place their bodies knew. They were deracinated, their roots taken from the soil upon which they had learned to thrive. And thus they embarked upon a project using imported plants, animals, technologies, and building forms from the continent they had left to remake the threatening new territory of Australia into a simulacrum of the English countryside. Like the artifices made virtually by aficionados of contemporary computer site SIMCITY, the result was a copy for which there never had been an original, a fantasy made by longing for a different space rather than by scrupulous close encounters of a daily kind. Some among the first generation were made abject by the loss of visceral correspondence between self and place. Yet humans can, and do, habituate to new ‘natures.’ They develop new reflexes and embodied understandings of nature to mirror their changed environments. To the children of the second generation, Dunlap notes, “Shelley’s nightingale and English hedges were as alien as the woollen school uniforms they wore in Sydney’s heat,” for the familiar these daughters and sons had embodied as natural was not their British born parents’ first familiar, but instead the ordinary of their part of the southern hemisphere.[44]

Scholarship on the social construction of gender relied heavily on embodiment as a figure of speech,epistemological embodiment and was framed to understand the meaning of gender formed in power relations and institutional structures. This is how Judith Butler analyzed the aetiology of Gender Trouble and was the basis for her insights in Body That Matter about how contemporary gendered assumptions constrained the research questions modern geneticists asked about sex.[45] Joan Scott traced the discursive history of “gender as a category of historical analysis” from similar epistemological premises.[46] But gender is also created by active experience, by the differing corporeal embodiment which flowed from the different labor women and men have performed historically, from the differing places in which they lived, worked, and played, and from what their daily lives taught them about the nature of their environments as active forces or terrains to be mastered.

Consider how Rachel Carson’s depiction in Silent Spring of nature as active and responsive[47] altered conceptions of biology, culture, and environment. Through her texts, Carson provided a way for urban moderns to share a sense plantsmen and gleaners long had embodied through their techniques,[48] that selves existed in reciprocity with nature; that humans were not nature’s masters; that nature could bite back.

Carolyn Merchant notes a similar difference in the ways Native Americans and Euro-Americans knew North America. Native Americans knew their environment as a tame and bountiful dwelling place. They experienced the earth as ‘an agent of regeneration,’ where women planted the corn, beans, and squash in forest gardens, and the produce of these activities sustained life. They reasoned about nature as an ascensionist and progressive force in their lives. Euro-Americans, by contrast, encountered the new world through the seventeenth-century conceptual baggage of Christian religion, modern science, and capitalism, which led them to consider the environment as ‘postlapsarian,’ a desert made when Adam took Eve’s poor advice in the Garden of Eden. Men’s job, thereafter, was to seize control of nature and recover what had been lost. The power of the way Euro-American traditions epistemologically embodied nature made them think of their harvests as the fruit of their own labour and proof that God favored them, rather than as the product of a partnership between human and non-human nature in which humans by corporeal embodiment had discerned nature’s autonomous ways.[49]

Partners function best when they openly attend to one another. Equally in the wilderness and in the garden, William Cronon urges us as humans “to recognize and honor nonhuman nature” as a world with its own independent, nonhuman reasons for being as it is…whose otherness compels our attention.”[50] This means recognizing not only nature as represented in models of empiricist science and theological doctrine, but the autonomous nature that sensing humans corporeally embody as ‘a feeling for the organism.’[51]

When humans develop gendered sensibilities, they do so through “species specific, culturally formed and historically positioned” experiences.[52] Vera Norwood notes of birds and humans that gender roles differ. Men are more likely to chase, capture, and signal, and women to watch, nest, and mend. These gender roles are critical to understanding how humans construct nature. ‘Nature is used to define human nature,’ and thus to endow as ‘natural’ the questionable privilege ‘granted to some embodied positions over others.’[53]

The same gendered relationships between doing, understanding, and being emerge in some histories of toxic technologies and the environment. In a 1992 wide-ranging review of research on environmental concern, for example, Paul Mohai noted a ‘gender gap’ between the activism of women and men.[54] When Phil Brown and Faith Ferguson followed Mohai’s work with a study of women’s work and women’s relationships in toxic waste activism, they found patterns in doing and knowing best explained as outcomes of differently corporally embodied experience and knowledge.[55] Because their choice of subject places them on Envirotech’s chosen intersection, between the histories of technology and the environment, a review of their findings provides a good way to revisit the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of a re-materialization of work in our field.

Brown and Ferguson begin by confirming that “grassroots activists who organize around toxic waste issues most often have been women, led by women.” They then note that women’s situations in family, work, and place positioned them daily and concretely to perceive environmental effects, particularly on the health of family members whose physical care in time of illness was often a female responsibility. Through intimate contact, feeding, bathing, and toileting the distressed, by the internal revelations which arose through these direct bodily contacts--touching, smelling, and hearing--they tracked the presence, process, and growing intensity of environmental body burden. The knowledge they gained was corporeally embodied, the experiential product of monitoring internal changes, not manifestly comparable or readily shared. The very relational capacities that made them open to the flux of suffering disqualified them as autonomous sources of knowledge and discounted what they learned as empathetic rather than objective.[56] The challenge for these lay toxic waste activists, both women and men, was to ‘blunt the rhetorical razor’ and insist that what they knew was not ‘experiential excess’ but crucial to understanding how the toxic outputs of some contemporary technologies were altering the environments in which they lived, worked, and played. The derogation of ‘housewife’ data, both for indefensible and for sounder reasons, remains a lively element in environmental equity research.

We need to read and write more research that takes human embodied relationships with technologies and environments. These connections yield useable and useful evidence of the robust materiality of human encounters with the world beyond their skin. The scrupulous historicism which is our province and practice as students and scholars of Clio’s craft makes us particularly fitted to take up this task and set an example for others pursuing technological and environmental studies.

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[1] Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves:A Book by and for Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, c1973 [1976, 1984, 1992]).

[2] N. Katherine Hayles, “Situated Nature and Natural Simulations: Rethinking the Relation between the Beholder and the World,” in William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: Norton, 1995), 409-25 and “Searching for Common Ground,” in Michael E. Soulé and Gary Lease, eds. Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995), 46-63.

[3] Hayles, “Searching for Common Ground,” 48.

[4] See Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Prospectus for a New Field,” Environmental History 8 (April 2003), 205.

[5] Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966) and The Silent Language (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959).

[6] Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Susan Strasser, Never Done (New York: Pantheon, 1982).

[7] Michael Polanyi, “Tacit Knowing,” in his The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 3-25.

[8] Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 27.

[9] William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992), 1347-76.

[10] Here I am borrowing the terms of Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 26-27.

[11] Barbara Duden, Women Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-century Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 14-15, 35-7, 79-80; Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 91-2; Isabel V. Hull, “The Body as Historical Experience: Review of Recent Works by Barbara Duden,” Central European History 28 (1995), 75; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) and Resisting Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

[12] Stanley J. Reiser, “Technology and the Use of the Senses in Twentieth-century Medicine,” in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Medicine and the Five Senses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 262-73.

[13] Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Walter J. Ong, “The Shifting Sensorium,” in The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale, 1967), 1-9.

[14] Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies and Knowledges,” in her Space, Time and Perversion (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 31; Leslie Adelson, Making Bodies, Making History: Feminism and German Identity (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 12, 16, 23.

[15] Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, (1982)1986); Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (New York: Columbia University Press, (1994)1998); Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea (Oxford: Blackwell, (1988) 1994); Corbin, Histoire du corps (Paris: Seuil, 2005).

[16] Sima Godfrey, “Alain Corbin: Making Sense of French History,” French Historical Studies 25 (2002), 395-96; Alain Corbin, The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clogmaker in Nineteeth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

[17] Maturana Humberto and Francisco Varela, Tree of Knowledge (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), 24.

[18] Adelson, “Of Bodies, Secrets and the Making of Histories,” 3, 10.

[19] Humberto Marurana and Bernhard Poerksen, From Being to Doing: the Origins of the Biology of Cognition (Heidelberg: Carl-Auer, 2004), 16-17 and Maturana and Varela, Tree of Knowledge, 24.

[20] Hayles, “Searching for Common Ground,” 49-50.

[21] Polanyi, “Tacit Knowing;” Hayles, “Searching for Common Ground,” 49-50; Edward S. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time,” in Steven Feld and Keith Basso, eds. Senses of Place (Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1996), 18-9.

[22] Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991)773-97 Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

[23] Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (New York: Humanities Press, 1962); Pierre Boudieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

[24] Laura Gowing, Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) is a compelling exploration of what was held private and became public in sense making about giving birth.

[25] Kathleen Canning, “The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History,” in her Gender and History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class and Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 168.

[26] Varela, et al, The Embodied Mind; and Evan Thompson, “The Mindful Body: Embodiment and Cognitive Science,” in Michael O’Donovan-Anderson, ed. The Incorporated Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Embodiment (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).

[27] Douglas Harper, Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Harper is working with the insights first articulated by Mauss as bodily techniques, Marcel Mauss, ‘Les techniques du corps,’ Journal de psychologie (Sociologie et anthropologie) (1936), 363-86.

[28] Adam Rome, “From the Editor,” Environmental History 9 (2004).

[29] Peter Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past: Toward an Environmental History of Sound and Noise,” Environmental History 10 (2005) 656

[30] “Smells Like?: Sources of Uncertainty in the History of an Environment,” Environmental History 11 (2006).

[31] N. Katherine Hayles, “Foreword: Clearing the Ground,” vii in Hansen, Embodied Technesis.

[32] This phrase is Isabel V. Hull’s praise for Barbara Duden’s practice in her “The Body as Historical Experience,” 75.

[33] Barbara L. Allen, “Narrating the Toxic Landscape in Landscape in ‘Cancer Alley,’ Louisiana,” in David Nye, ed. Technologies of Landscape: From Reaping to Recycling (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 188-89.

[34] Allen, “Narrating the Toxic Landscape,” 193, 195, 199.

[35] Miriam Wright, “Young Men and Technology: Government Attempts to Create a ‘Modern’ Fisheries Workforce in Newfoundland, 1949-1970,” Labour/Le travail 42 (1998), 143-59.

[36] Thomas J Csordas, “Modes of Somatic Attention,” Cultural Anthropology 8 (1993), 135-56.

[37] Raymond Smilor, “Personal Boundaries in the Urban Environment: The Legal Attack on Noise, 1865-1930,” in Char Miller and Hal Rothman, eds. Out of the Woods: Essays in Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 181-93.

[38] Virginia Scharff, “Lighting Out for the Territory: Women, Mobility and Western Place,” in Richard White and John Findlay, eds. Place and Power in the North American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 287-303; Scharff, “Of Parking Spaces and Women’s Places: The Los Angelos Parking Ban of 1920,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 1 (1988), 37-51; Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York: Free Press, 1991).

[39] Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), vi, 1-2.

[40]Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Viking, 2000) and Joseph Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

[41] Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) and Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

[42] David Nye’s writing about origin stories makes similar points. By for our purposes here, I have decentered the narrative. David Nye, “Technology, Nature and American Origin Stories,” Environmental History 8 (2003), 8-24.

[43] Linda Nash, “Finishing Nature: Harmonizing Bodies and Environments in Late-nineteenth-century California,” Environmental History 8 (January 2003), 6, 15.

[44] Thomas R. Dunlap, “Australian Nature, European Culture: Anglo Settlers in Australia,” in Miller and Rothman, Out of the Woods, 273-89.

[45] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Body That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993).

[46] Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (1986), 1053-75 and her Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

[47] Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1962), 261; L. Max Oelschlaeger, “Re-placing History, Naturalising Culture,” in John Herron and Andrew Kirk, eds. Human/Nature: Biology, Culture and Environmental History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 63-78; Maril Hazlett, “‘woman vs man vs bugs’: Gender and Popular Ecology in Early Reactions to Silent Spring,” Environmental History 9 (2004), 701-29.

[48] Marcel Mauss, ‘Les techniques du corps,’ 363-86.

[49] Carolyn Merchant, “Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative,” in William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground (New York: Norton, 1995), 132, 133, 144, 158; see also Carolyn Merchant, “Gender and Environmental History,” Journal of American History 76 (1990), 1117, 1119; Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Merchant, Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Environmental Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980); Vera Norwood Made from the Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Max Oelschlaeger, “Re-placing History, Naturalizing Culture,” in Herron and Kirk, eds. Human Nature: Biology, Culture and Environmental History (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 69.

[50] William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Char Miller and Hal Rothman, eds. Out of the Woods: Essays in Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1997), 46-49.

[51] A stance in practice and interpretive promise are well recounted in Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: the life and work of Barbara McClintock (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1983).

[52] Vera Norwood, “Constructing Gender,” in Herron and Kirk, Human Nature, 50 drawing upon Hayles, “Searching for Common Ground.”

[53] Norwood, “Constructing Gender,” 55, 57, 60.

[54] Paul Mohai, “Men, Women and the Environment: An Examination of the Gender Gap in Environmental Concern and Activism,” Society and Natural Resources 5 (1992), 1-19.

[55] Phil Brown and Faith T. Ferguson, “‘Making a Big Stink,’ Women’s Work, Women’s Relationships and Toxic Waste Activism,” Gender and Society 9 (1995), 145-72.

[56] Dorothy Smith, Everyday Life and Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 51; Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 70.