Soil theories : relational, decolonial, inhuman

Diverse theoretical impulses and different conversations within the social sciences and the humanities have rendered visible different questions about soil’s relationship to social life. Without trying to draw a linear history, in this chapter we propose a program for mapping out the theorization(s) of soil. We first address the un-theorization of soil—by which we mean the conspicuous non-theorization of soil—in the human and social sciences for most of the twentieth century. We propose that the invisibility of soil in contemporary social and political theory can be traced back to a range of sociohistorical separations that have transformed soil into a taken-for- granted, invisible infrastructure for modern cities, agriculture, and markets, as raw matter or a resource separate from society and emerging only as its residue—that which is left behind in post-apocalyptic narratives of the end of civilization as we know it. We then explore the ways in which contemporary social theories have engaged with soils as both a process and a physicality to think about the human–nature nexus: theories that dwell in the shifting, heterogeneous, vertical layering of soil to explore how soil and society are assembled together—even if as divergence. We suggest that these contemporary developments are characterized by two conceptual gestures. On the one hand, they locate soils as generated by multifarious practices, apparatuses, and modes of attention. On the other, they take soils as generating publics, politics, and relations. The socialization of soils, and the soiling of the social. Taken together, these theories mobilize the generativity of “thinking with soil” for decentering social and political theory from the Anthropos, and for decolonizing narratives of conservation and attentiveness to land, nature, and the geological to develop better and more responsible attunements to socioecological entanglements in a time of ecological crisis.