Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the potential for anthropology to address unmaking by reflecting on how the presence of, and life among ruins, reveals the affective character of abandonment.

Paper long abstract:

Rural abandonment can be considered the flipside of rapid urbanisation. Globally occurring, abandonment threatens livelihoods and cultural heritage, leaving behind vulnerable spaces. This paper presents an ethnographic account of the lives of people in a village in the south of Spain and their relations to their material surroundings; of neighbours who know they are the last ones to ever live there, see their village crumble apart bit by bit, and recount stories of how life used to be and of the choices they have had to make that eventually led to irresistible abandonment. In this context, I interrogate the process of un/making of material structures, as well as the fabric of social life. Unmaking, I argue, appears not a simple, careless destruction, but as historically self-conscious and selective, engaged and affective. Unmaking relates to stories of pasts and challenges the possibility of futures, and in so doing coincides with hopeful or desperate forms of making.