This book examines the embodied nature of people's experience in, and of, the modern world. It is therefore part of the deep-seated 'turn towards the body'. However, it is partly critical of this development in as much as it affirms that the sociology of the body has downplayed the extent to which the body is located in, and involved with, nature, the countryside, the outdoors, landscape and wilderness.
The book argues that bodies in nature are subject to novel, complex and contradictory opportunities of freedom and escape, surveillance and monitoring. The book guides readers through the various ways in which these bodily opportunities and constraints are temporally and spatially organized and managed.