I use the two pictures of this collection as a kind of editorial on how I see issues of embodiment in NatureCulture projects, reflecting on how a focus on individualized embodiments of discipline or embodiments according to inherited analytical languages of race, class and gender has led to further exploration of how different beings embody together, and how those embodiments are relationally or ecologically constituted (inspired by the works of feminist anthropologists and scholars like Marilyn Strathern, Anne-Marie Mol, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Donna Haraway).
The discussions in this field visit in Osaka prefecture focused on the infrastructural changes to the river as a response to deadly floods in the 20th century, and the ecological impacts of these changes. These modern ecologies were inhabited by many organisms, its species bearing a particular story. Nutoria were an "invasive species" released into the wild, a though they were originally imported for their use in producing fighter pilot vests in Japan. Fireflies had disappeared from the river following the installation of embankments and the development of the neighbourhoods, but were brought in periodically during the summer, resulting in a small resurgence in their population. These species and many others are each changing the lives of the others and the places they inhabit, making these heavily modified environments into their homes. Even this story of a kind of co-habitation (or kyousei, the theme of the intensive course), however, belies the history of the dead part of the river. Now a park filled with trees and wandering paths, it was once a place people threw their trash. These dynamics highlight what Myers, Suzuki, and Pitrou in this essay emphasize about bodies and life: it is a coming together and making of bodies along with their worlds, using their sensitivities and materialities to sense and make their way through places, that are far from either natural or cultural.
