Elsevier

Public Health

Volume 141, December 2016, Pages 287-293
Public Health

Original Research
Sociology, environment and health: a materialist approach

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2016.09.015Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The paper offers a post-anthropocentric and new materialist approach to the sociology of environment and health.

  • Human health is one among a number of capacities emerging from humans interactions with the social and natural world.

  • Interventions should foster social and natural interactions that enhance environmental (and hence, human) potentiality.

  • This new materialist approach has relevance for public health practice and policy.

Abstract

Objectives

This paper reviews the sociology of environment and health and makes the case for a postanthropocentric approach based on new materialist theory. This perspective fully incorporates humans and their health into ‘the environment’, and in place of human-centred concerns considers the forces that constrain or enhance environmental capacities.

Study design

This is not an empirical study. The paper uses a hypothetical vignette concerning child health and air pollution to explore the new materialist model advocated in the paper.

Methods

This paper used sociological analysis.

Results

A new materialist and postanthropocentric sociology of environment and health are possible. This radically reconfigures both sociological theory and its application to research and associated policies on health and the environment. Theoretically, human health is rethought as one among a number of capacities emerging from humans interactions with the social and natural world. Practically, the focus of intervention and policy shifts towards fostering social and natural interactions that enhance environmental (and in the process, human) potentiality.

Conclusions

This approach to research and policy development has relevance for public health practice and policy.

Section snippets

Introduction: sociology, humans and the environment

The interaction between the environment and human health has been of concern to medicine since Galen's theory of humours sought to explain disease as a dialectical relationship between bodily constitution and environmental or societal hazards.1 While the rise of germ theory and a medical model of disease undermined this dialectic, the emergence of public health in the Victorian era reflected continued humouralist concerns with the effects of the environment upon health.2 The interaction between

Sociological approaches to environment and health

Social scientists have engaged variously with issues concerning environment and ecology, typically differentiating between the physical and biological environment and the social and cultural environment. Sociologists have applied a broad notion of environment as a context for social action, in which ‘the environment’ is basically everything that is not part of a human body, a product of human agency, or a human construction.10, 11 They analyzed the interactions between society and the

‘New materialism’: challenging nature/culture dualism

Despite social science's shift from exceptionalist to ecological paradigm, it has remained fundamentally anthropocentric, placing humanity at the centre of its perspective. Arguably, this anthropocentric distinction is deeply ingrained in the philosophy of the social sciences, with ‘nature’ having always been treated conceptually and politically as culture's ‘Other’.33 Historically, culture/nature dualism has been a neat way to set limits on the concerns of the social and natural sciences,

The environment and child health

The impacts of environment factors, from pesticides to air pollution to radiation fall-out, have been of concern to public health,46 including effects of road traffic pollutants on children's health.47, 48 To explore how a materialist sociology might address these interactions, consider a hypothetical policy initiative undertaken by public health staff in a UK city council to improve child health, of the type advocated by WHO.49 This initiative sought to reduce the number of vehicles using the

Discussion

Sociology has sought in various ways to explore, theorize and problematize the study of the environment and interactions between environment and human health. However, despite advances from a position that gave automatic exemption to humans from participation in the rest of the natural world to one that acknowledged humans as part of a global ecosystem,10 we have argued the need for a postanthropocentric ontology that cuts through nature/culture dualism and takes matter rather than human agency

Author statements

This paper has not been previously published or considered for publication elsewhere.

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