In this fresh, provocative, and profound book, LeCain presents a cogent explication of neo-materialist history, an approach that regards all organic and inorganic things as historical actors. He first offers his own neomaterialist theory and then shows us what it looks like in practice. Arguing against anthropocentric thinking that sets humans apart from or against nature, LeCain asserts that a dynamic, creative, powerful material environment of nonliving elements and other organisms has “helped to create humans and their thoughts, ideas, culture and history” (11). LeCain opens by considering the Human Microbiome Project’s findings that much of the human body consists of independent bacteria, microbes, and viruses in constant interaction with the surrounding environment, leading some scholars to suggest that humans are not unitary beings but a collection of organisms that resemble a coral reef.
He develops these and other findings to contend that humans are “thoroughly and entirely natural” (17), embedded in the environment with embodied minds. The next chapter explores the roots of the opposing concept of the immaterial mind and human exceptionalism. LeCain examines how materialism has been problematical in the past, explains how neo-materialism differs from Marxian determinism as well as, importantly, biological, environmental, and technological determinism, and critiques the abstractions of modernist and postmodernist thought. He reviews the work of environmental historians, historians of technology, animal historians, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, philosophers, and others in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. The third chapter provides what he considers the key concepts for this methodology—the centrality of the natural environment, the power of things, the proper place of culture, and the rejection of anthropocentrism.
In the following three chapters, LeCain sets neo-materialist history in motion by means of three impressive case studies. He examines cattle ranching and copper mining in Montana, and sericulture and copper mining in Japan, considering along the way geology, grass, biochemistry, the physiology of human touch, the molecular structure of silk, the Silk Road, the biochemistry of arctic cod and spiders, the chemistry of copper pollution, and the deep co-evolutionary history of cattle, silkworms, and humans. The third chapter in this group intertwines these two histories as he discusses the material worlds from which Japanese and American industrial societies emerged so that they became “copper people” (272). LeCain demonstrates how neo-materialist methodology reinterprets historical events and problems. It is also a demanding interdisciplinary methodology, as LeCain ranges through a wide array of topics and draws on many disciplines.
