Ariel Salleh


Ariel Salleh is an Australian sociologist who writes on humanity-nature relations, social change movements, and ecofeminism.

Career

Ariel Salleh is a sociologist in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. Formerly Associate Professor in Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney, she has lectured in New York, Manila, Toronto and, most recently, was a Visiting Professor at Lund University.
She was a convener of the Movement Against Uranium Mining in Sydney, 1976, and helped found The Greens in 1985. She worked on the 1992 Earth Summit with Women's Environment & Development Organization; on local catchment struggles in the mid 90s; and from 2001-04 acted as ecologist/critic on the Australian federal government's Gene Technology Ethics Committee.

Materialist ecofeminism

In contrast to idealist ecofeminisms coming from philosophy and cultural studies, Salleh's analysis is close to that of fellow sociologists Maria Mies in Germany and Mary Mellor in the United Kingdom. Reproductive labor and use value are central themes here. The gendered division of labour is seen as the major cause of the crisis of social reproduction and the ecological crises as its main outcome. Her own "embodied materialism" addresses resistance to globalisation through the movement of movements, introducing the term "meta-industrial labour" to integrate indigenous, peasant, women's, and worker politics under the banner of ecology. Salleh exemplifies the Marxist argument that hands-on praxis is essential to grounded political theory.
Her book Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern outlines the scope of a materialist feminism, proposing a transdisciplinary analysis of the embodied roots of capitalist patriarchal globalisation. The book is one of the earliest eco-socialist statements. Salleh traces the effects of what she sees as the "originary contradiction": economic resourcing of labour "as nature" and the eurocentric ideology of "humanity v nature" used to justify that systemic exploitation. The failure to observe natures ‘metabolic value’ and the inherent thought of production and exchange value are ignored by the radical left. The book contains a sharp critique of the patriarchal bias in both orthodox Marxist thought and in green politics.
Ariel Salleh works at en/gendering dialogue between advocates of ecofeminist and eco-socialist politics. Her writing has addressed this terrain since the early 1980s and she was an original signatory to the 2001 Eco-socialist Manifesto. Her critical studies of green thought, environmental ethics, and ecopolitics, run to some 100 articles and chapters. She lectures on ecofeminism internationally.

Key concepts

Embodied materialism

Following Marx’s analysis, Salleh uses a dialectical methodology to extend the classic Marxist meaning of materialism to “embodied materialism” through highlighting the hands-on lay knowledge of women, domestic providers, small farmers, and hunter-gatherers. It defines the experience itself as a deep implication on women’s lives. According to her theoretical developments and her experience as an activist, understanding the materiality of gender fractures allows for a confluence between different movements and a renewed integration of transformative perspectives. Her call for integrating eco-socialist and eco-feminist frameworks lays on the need to understand that historically, women´s experiences and responses to different crises are different than those of men. Woman have been differentially implicated in the humanity/nature metabolism even since pre-capitalist patriarchal societies. In her approach, "humans are nature in an embodied form". Embodied materialism is a theoretical tool for political practice, that analyses this materiality from a dialectical understanding of the daily life of women, peasants, and indigenous peoples in their particular relation to nature, in other words, the relations and knowledge of the meta-industrial class.

Meta-industrial labour

Meta-industrial labour is one of the key concepts in Ariel Salleh's work. The term refers to work outside of capitalist structures, done by care-givers, peasants, and indigenes, together forming the meta-industrial class. This meta-industrial class performs work that creates a metabolic value, by maintaining natural cycles. This opposes the current extractive industrial model, which creates ecological, embodied and social debt.
Being marginalised by capitalist societies and politics, this class seems is often victimised or seen as something from the past. In reality, they manage to do what ‘sustainability’ is all about; meeting human needs while sustaining their natural environment. Salleh invites the current hegemony to be open to the embodied knowledge of this meta-industrial class, instead of capturing it by development aid, commodifying it or marginalising it.

Selected works