ABSTRACT
Social thought has had an unsteady relationship to the material world. Although, as disciplines, anthropology has long pondered the material grittiness of life, geography underwent a long phase of environmental determinism, and economics and political economy have long taken material resources and the corresponding material basis of society into account, too much social thought turned its attention away from the material world for stretches of the 20th century. In the modern west, the stuff of things has been generically characterized as matter: everything that composes material entities, like the entities themselves, is ultimately matter. Material arrangements often simply support practices, as when the human body underwrites human activity, floors, walls, and ceilings enable practices to be carried out indoors, and an elaborate technological structure enables digital communication, file sharing, and gaming. Practices are composed of organized doings and sayings. A doing is the doing of something and a saying is the saying of something.
