Paper short abstract:

After each rainfall, soil erosion on the Greek island of Samothraki reshapes both the physical landscape and the specific socio-temporal assemblages of its human and non-human inhabitants. This paper will explore the emerging narrations of history and self arising from living on unstable ground.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will explore the multiple perceptions, imaginaries and narrations of goat herders surrounding soil erosion on the island of Samothraki in North-Eastern Greece. As shifting soils regularly “unearth” the landscape, this instability unsettles previously held narratives of the past and the future, as well as the grounding of one’s own knowledge in relation to a broader web of relations which includes plants, animals and weather events. The living memory of past practices, such as the communal management of agricultural terraces, thus takes on a new urgency, calling forth renewed ways of inhabiting with the landscape, while also eliciting complex responses towards institutional injunctions to “modernize”, at the junction of different contested local and global historicities. At the same time, new forms of relating to the weather itself emerge, bringing forth conceptualizations of rains and droughts as moral and cosmological categories with which different relations and understandings become negotiated. Drawing on my fieldwork with goat herders faced with the ongoing uncertain reshaping of the landscape they inhabit, I will present a few key aspects in which erosion “provokes” (Massey, 2006) a reconfiguration of temporal and spatial relations. In being attentive to the transitional moment of erosion and the efforts of Samothracian goat herders to make sense of the protean soil they live on with other animals and plants, this paper will call attention to the ongoing, precarious work of landscape making.