Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism

Bread and Dirt

Eating Dirt

Sign on the wall of El Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico T his place feels old beyond human recollection. The carvings and paintings were surely done by human hands, but no one remembers whose hands those were. The work is striking, especially in the apse behind the altar. There, the colors of surrounding hills have been transferred onto nearly luminous wooden reredos full of Catholic symbolism....

Dig the Dirt

It seems kind of strange that eating parasitic worms causes a cure rather than a disease. Yet, this fact is no stranger than many other man-bites-dog stories about "real life" in contemporary times. Such stories arise at moments of changing equilibria in the processes of the social construction of reality. They are especially evident during periods of intense dialectic in which long held theses...

1. Material Theory

This is a book about induction and inductive inference. Since these terms may mean different things to different people, it is worth fixing at the outset what is meant by them here. Traditionally, induction has had a narrow meaning. At its narrowest, it refers to “induction by simple enumeration,” the inference from “Some As are B” to “All As are B.” This is an example of what is known as “ampl...

Dirt and disease: polio before FDR

his scientific reputation, Hammond now sought to apply clinical tools and methods to the resolution of neurological puzzles. Over the next two decades, though, his extravagant but ill-supported claims for his specialty, his flamboyance, and his evident opportunism gradually undermined his professional standing, even among his neurological colleagues. Increasingly isolated even in the profession...