Activating dark earths: somatosoils and the carbonic loops of Amazonian ecologies

Abstract

Inspired by the fertility and climate change-mitigation properties of the so-called Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs), soil science has devised a technoscientific replica, a soil amendment known as biochar, intended to improve agricultural sustainability and carbon storage in the biosphere. Drawing on fieldwork with Afroindigenous horticulturalists, this article shows, however, that the activation of these soils’ vibrant ecology responds to looping, carbonic, and socially mediated forms of human and other-than-human corporeal interplay. With an ethnography of swidden horticulture in Amazonia, I propose the notion of ‘somatosoils’ to consider that the fertility and other metabolic properties of ADEs might be located not in the soil, but in the relations between the earth's bodies and the specific human gestures that stimulate these soils’ inner life.