Bodies and environmental matters in Maoism and Gandhism

Abstract

When the global material reality has already been reshaped and determined by western modernity, Gandhism and Maoism stand for attempts to discover a material world other than the existing one. I examine the ways in which the theory and practice of the body in Mao and Gandhi resonates with new materialisms' views of the body and matter as dynamic multitude and anti-dualistic open system. Gandhi and Mao share the concerns of new materialism in terms of seeing human bodies, environments, (in)organic matters and systems as configurations of multiple influences and dependencies. To put Maoism and Gandhism in the perspective of today's new materialism, the entanglement of human, nature and matter in their ideas also functions as a kind of agency in connection to other socio-political forces (instead of deploying ethics, as current new materialist ontologies have done) to enact changes. The ways in which the two formidable Asian thinkers grasp materials sound more like an abstraction, revealing that materialisms – either old or new – may be something other than what they define themselves as.