Thoreau's body: Towards an embodied environmental history

Biologists turning to history have acknowledged cultural influences on our surprisingly malleable genetics and physiology. Students of bodily perception have found that in many times and places it remains inextricable from contemporaneous medical and scientific naturalisms, as cultural studies of the body have uncovered longer-term continuities in the experience of bodily nature. For environmental history to contend with these findings, distinctions that have long provided tacit boundaries for our field-between body and environment, human and nonhuman nature-themselves need to become foci for our historical inquiry. By dint of the Thoreauvian example, this essay also points to ways our field may contribute to this scholarship, in particular to its rethinking of the habitual sharpness with which we distinguish bodily nature from body culture.