Metabolic ethnography

Metabolism is witnessing a renewed interest in human geography and the social sciences. Although conceptual work has elaborated its chemical, political and economic dimensions, qualitative methods have not kept pace with the industrial reorganization of metabolism. This article advances a metabolic ethnography: a sustained inquiry into material transformation that traces social, spatial and economic processes from altered metabolic relations. Organized around three orientations – eating, substance and pathways – it argues that ethnography must be reoriented in response to regimes of exposure, incorporation and circulation that now condition life in an industrialized world - recasting what counts as method across the social sciences.