This book explores the failure of established institutions to challenge the categorical centrality of 'Western Man' to modernity. This failure can be linked to a fundamental tension between the tired assumptions of modernism and the urgent needs of a complex age characterized by eco-crises: a tension in which mainstream social and legal theory are, by and large, still implicated. Building on the compelling critiques emerging from ecofeminism, political economy, ethno-ecology and some strands of legal theory, this collection provides both a sustained interrogation of disembodied forms of living. And in so doing, it advocates a re-embodiment of the human, and a re-embedding of human understandings and practices in the fact of our bio-material existence.