What if Culture was Nature all Along?

Vicki Kirby is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales. The motivating question in her research is the riddle of the nature/culture division because so many political and ethical evaluations and decisions are configured in terms of this opposition. Books include Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Duke 2011); Judith Butler: Live Theory (Continuum 2006) and Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (1997).

• AcknowledgementsForeword1 Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in ReviewVicki Kirby2 Method Matters: The Ethics of ExclusionAshley Barnwell3 Sensory Substitution: The Plasticity of the Eye/IFlorence Chiew4 Allergy as the Puzzle of Causality Michelle Jamieson5 Pregnant Men: Paternal Postnatal Depression and a Culture of Hormones Rebecca Oxley6 Material Culture: Epigenetics and the Molecularisation of the Social Noela Davis7 Racialised Visual Encounters Xin Liu8 Microbiology as Sociology: The Strange Sociality of Slime Jacqueline Dalziell9 Nature Represents Itself: Bibliophilia in the Anthropocene Astrida Neimanis10 Climate Change, Socially Synchronised: Are We Really Running out of Time? Will Johncock11 A Sociality of Death: Towards a New Materialist Politics and Ethics of Life Itself Peta HintonNotes on ContributorsIndex

What if Culture was Nature all Along? stands out as both a methodological and a theoretical volume. It succeeds in presenting and exploring the complexities and the co-implication of culture and nature, thought and matter, human and nonhuman, science and sociology, life and death, in action. It thus demonstrates that if nature is ‘writing’ all the way down, writing can be neither cultural nor natural, but remains – and this is one of Derrida’s major lessons – entirely other.