ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that different sort of body was required to underpin the modern fiction of a possessive body, a discrete individual subtracted from the overwhelming forces of nature and social relationships. Liberalism, understood as the application of an individualistic view to social relationships, is a very specific ontology and technology of the self. The chapter shows how emerging discourses in biomedical disciplines in the second half of the nineteenth century incorporated and even underpinned some of the political values breaking with earlier connections of liberalism and sensibility. Significant neo-Lamarckian influences can also be found in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geography, which drew on use-inheritance to make sense of the “interaction between particular physical environments and local cultures”. It was to this state of affairs and context – a radical embedding and absorption of the organism in its surroundings – which Darwin Erasmus’s selectionism spoke through its repositioning of the relationship between life’s forms and life’s conditions.
