Presentation short abstract

This study examines Maoist China's prospecting movement through sensory politics, showing how touching, tasting, smelling, and walking helped constitute a socialist geobody and shaped subsurface knowledge, extractive power, and environmental governance.

Presentation long abstract

This study examines the national mineral prospecting movement in Maoist China as a project of making a socialist geobody and as a multisensory political ecology of resource extraction. Following Winichakul's notion of the geobody as a national body imagined and sustained through mapping and scientific ways of knowing, the study extends the concept beyond its original territorial focus to include the subsurface. Drawing on archival documents, propaganda reports, geological handbooks, and personal memoirs, it demonstrates that embodied and multisensory knowledge was central to geological science and practice in Maoist China. Between the 1950s and 1970s, millions of farmers, students, and workers were mobilised to walk mountain slopes, handle rocks, taste spring water, smell sulphurous vapours, and scan the land for mineral clues. These sensory practices incorporated their bodies into the state's extractive apparatus and rendered them the "sensory organs" of a geobody that linked subsurface resources to state power. Their observations extended state knowledge into strata and fissures, while the patriotic sentiment attached to "discovering treasures for the nation" reinforced identification with the socialist project. Through bodily labour, sensory training, and political feeling, the geobody took shape in ways aligned with Maoist revolutionary ideals. The national prospecting movement thus reveals that the occupation of resources and authority was also an occupation of perception and the senses. This sensory political ecology shaped forms of environmental governance and extractive power and continues to influence contemporary understandings of resources, territory, and the state in China.