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Thing theorist Bill Brown writes that “the thing names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” This article examines the subject-object relation between African things and African bodies in Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus. While the main character, Kambili, eventually learns to assimilate Western Catholicism into her Nigerian reality, her Christian fundamentalist father, Eugene, uses Catholicism to justify his self-hating destruction of African things and bodies. This article argues that both reactions are rooted in the characters' ability or inability to see African material things, including both objects and bodies, as autonomous subjects. Adichie's novel demonstrates that religious syncretism centered in an ethics of things is a viable, fruitful reaction to the colonizers' religion, and that religious practice can be healthily enacted through the medium of things and bodies.

This study turns to what is for many an everyday item – yogurt – as a critical zone observatory, a synergistic, place-based laboratory which aims to integrate heterogenous representations of planetary phenomena as they are registered at a common surface. Yogurt has an impressive cultural endurance largely derived from its prominence in various paradigms of health. The product has culturally endured in another sense: as a common cultural medium where humans and microbes have met for generations. This study begins with a profile of yogurt as most encounter it today to consider how normative notions of health interface with the temporal and spatial imaginaries entailed in commodity geographies. Commoditized yogurt is characterized by a low and limited microbial biodiversity compared to yogurts produced outside of the commodity context. Yogurt is therefore presented as a micro case study to consider modes by which we sense and valuate ecological phenomena beyond the perceptible surface, how such sens-abilities intersect models of health, and to what effect. To trace a history of yogurt along these contours, I introduce it as a particular kind of artefact: a global object. As an object of environmental history, I define a global object as a global commodity with a high potential to be re-localized, and therefore with a high potential to re-shape commodity geographies. However, this trajectory is contingent upon framing yogurt as a critical zone observatory – a site where global phenomena like human-microbial interaction may become familiar and intimate. Guided by new materialist theory, I weave together historical and ethnographic case studies from the following consortium: resident yogurt bacteria, artisanal yogurt producers and home fermenters, a mystical immunologist, and an 11th century linguistic scholar. Through these perspectives, I both sketch and apply a framework for de-centered, interspecies histories of cultural (re)production through an extended metaphor of biofilm: the coagulative bacterial structure giving yogurt its characteristic texture. In so doing I provide a re-articulation of “the probiotic” as an integrative case of human and more-than-human health. The study concludes by directing these implications towards a consideration of aesthetic engagement by displaying how fermentation practice may enliven matters of re-diversification and re-localization.

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Organ-ing is a multidisciplinary choreographic project that operates through a set of obscure organs that expand from spaces into bodies and from bodies into spaces. These organs don’t have vital functions and don’t seem to want to be named either; one could absolutely survive without them. Their byproducts are dances, sounds, objects, and poems: a gathering of lovers in lust for touch. Organ-ing is a strategy for a worlding that doesn’t stop at the body's borders. It is realised through an interest in the organ as a form that holds things as well as an ongoing formation. As an organ grows, I learn what it does. The project doesn’t follow linear paths of causality concerning what forms what: these organs shape and are shaped by what they create and hold. While realised and felt inside the human body, they also pour into and out of it. They might be organs of a human but they aren’t human organs. These emergent organs propose a sense of fiction to intertwine with the body’s pre-existing narratives, whether medical or holistic, and bring forth an array of fantasies that weave together the felt sense of the body. The organs of organ-ing don’t mean correcting or questioning what is already there. Instead, they twist or expand mostly pre-existent physical capacities to fabricate a body lustfully entangled with itself and its environment, with the ability and deep desire to belong. This alternative thesis is a website found on https://organ-ing.gergodfarkas.com/. The website contains hyperlinks, which lead to a series of footnotes. These footnotes can also be read as a coherent text.