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- Convenors:
-
Franz Krause
(University of Cologne)
Tanya Richardson (Wilfrid Laurier University)
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- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Discussing the ways that grounds are constructed, heterogeneous and shifting, vulnerable to destruction and alienation, and acknowledging their potential power to shape what happens in, on, above and under them, this roundtable explores ways of understanding the ground of ethnographic research.
Long Abstract:
On what grounds do anthropologists and related researchers work? How do they ground their empirical studies and their theorising? And what happens if, upon closer inspection, the supposed solidity of the ground gives way to unstable, shifting and problematic textures? What happens in wartime when, as Svitlana Matviyenko writes, “the ground moves under our feet and so does our map? … One day it leads you out of a blockaded city, next day it betrays you”?
This roundtable brings together investigations, inspirations and initiatives that understand ground, groundedness, and loss of ground (groundlessness) in new ways. It reflects on an era characterised by widespread projects of doing and undoing grounds in multiple, and often highly problematic ways, including not only terraforming, extractivism, imperial and colonial wars, but also land-based resistance movements, renewed attention to Indigenous convictions about Country/The Land, and persistent repair work in war-damaged places. Producing new grounds and eroding others, these processes transform the composition and affordances of the earth’s surfaces, subterranean spaces, and atmospheres. Moreover, many practices that seemed firmly grounded turn out to be suspended in much wider circulations of matter and meaning. The more closely we focus on the ground itself, the more it seems to dissolve as a solid substrate and emerge as a contentious and unstable zone perpetually transformed by matter and living beings.
To kick off our roundtable discussion, we invite participants to bring an object, with the help of which to share a two-minute story about grounds, groundedness, and losing ground.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Vaiva Aglinskas (CUNY Graduate Center. Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore)
Contribution short abstract:
As skyscrapers fill in the “Architectural hill” of the Vilnius business district, entire slopes of actual hills are disappearing in the historical city center and its periphery. How do construction stakes serve as vehicles of affect and harbingers of loss in this shape-shifting terrain?
Contribution long abstract:
In the Spring of 2013, the municipality of Vilnius decided to cut down all the trees on Gediminas castle mound to make the city’s central historic landmark more visible. This resulted in landslides over the following years that accidentally also unearthed historically significant remains of rebels from 1863. The mishap also provided fertile ground for ironic poems and new “phrases of the year” such as “I'm holding up like Gediminas Hill”. Another humorous phrase “trinkelizacija” circulates as a critique of over-paving urban surfaces with EU funding, leaving less actual ground to walk on in the city. I argue that an emotional rollercoaster of suspicion, apprehension, shock, anger, grief, resignation, or occasionally hope is initially triggered by a mundane object - the stake - that appears in the urban landscape as a harbinger of change. In 2021, as part of a militant research project, the Naujininkai Commons Collective symbolically repurposed such stakes to claim common ground and point out edible plants as an act of counter-mapping and resistance to the construction of massive new housing complexes that not only blocked access to public green space but drastically excavated and removed entire hillsides. Stakes, in this case, refer both to the “affectively charged material object" (Newell 2018) of a pointed piece of wood driven into the ground as a marker, but also the risks and personal investment - what is at stake- for both real estate developers and residents caught up in the power struggle to transform or retain terrain.
Anna Balazs (University of St Andrews)
Contribution short abstract:
The paper discusses how to approach long-term anthropological engagement with a place when one’s field site is destroyed by war, and limited access to the field makes knowledge production ethically and practically problematic.
Contribution long abstract:
How to do anthropology when one’s field site has been destroyed by war and made inaccessible by occupation forces? How to ask questions from a distance when researcher and interlocutors are irreversibly separated by the expanding gap between their lived experiences? The destiny of Mariupol and its residents has been in the centre of my attention both as a private individual and as a researcher since the start of the Donbas war in 2014. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the occupation of Mariupol by Russian military forces has dramatically changed the possibilities of ethnographic research about the city. Some of the major issues that preoccupied the residents before 2022, like the environmental pollution caused by the steel factories, ceased to exist completely with the destruction of infrastructural objects they concerned. Russian occupation authorities and – not insignificantly – the strict risk assessment protocols of Western universities regarding Ukraine made it impossible for researchers to officially visit the field and make sense of the events from a position of shared knowledge and solidarity. Studying the war from a distance feels like an ethically problematic and incomplete form of inquiry. Coming from the above position, I will discuss how to approach long-term anthropological engagement with we lose the ground under our feet, our knowledge becomes outdated and our voice as an ethnographer gradually invalidated by circumstances.
Ekin Kurtic (Northwestern University)
Contribution short abstract:
A piece of rubble salvaged from a school building that was destroyed before its inundation under dam waters will illuminate the story of a contestation centered around the question of who is entitled to salvage in the material undoing of the grounds.
Contribution long abstract:
This presentation delves into my experience of conducting ethnographic fieldwork on gradually disappearing grounds. In January 2023, I revisited the site of my long-term research, a small town in the Çoruh Basin where Turkey's tallest dam had been under construction for a decade. In those days, the dam began to retain the river water, progressively submerging the grounds where the town's residents had built a laborious life in what they framed as a challenging and distant frontier zone. The process of dismantling the town before the water reached it proved to be as laborious as its construction. With the help of a piece of rubble collected from a school building that was dismantled and razed to the ground, I will tell a story of contestation centered around the question of who is entitled to salvage in the material process of undoing the grounds under submergence.
Tanya Richardson (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Contribution short abstract:
The concept of voluminous socialities is used to explain shifting relations between ground and air and between distant and proximate locations in establishing and losing the isolatedness of a mating area for honeybee queens.
Contribution long abstract:
In recent years, honeybee breeders in Transcarpathia, Ukraine have tried to establish isolated mating areas for the purposes of breeding Carpathian honeybees. Absolute isolation is difficult to achieve because villages are never far away and because of bees’ aerial mobilities and mating practices. Many Carpathian breeders nevertheless set up isolated mating areas in order to assert some control over mating by reducing the likelihood of encounters between their queens and undesired drones. In choosing the ground on which to locate mating areas careful attention is paid to features such as topography, windiness, nectar-bearing flowers, sun exposure, road access, and proximity to villages with other beekeepers. This presentation focuses on how one of these remote mountain isolated mating areas lost its isolatedness. Large numbers of swarms flew up the valley to settle in tree hollows, likely because Russia’s war on Ukraine prevented beekeepers from selling their splits. This forced the breeder to set up on new ground higher up in the mountains in closer proximity to bears, who may try to dig under electric fences if they can’t disable them. I develop the concept of voluminous socialities to explain shifting relations between ground and air and between distant and proximate locations. A bear toenail will serve as the entry point to the story.
Hanna Nieber (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Contribution short abstract:
Burs at the site of a potential future observatory in Madagascar show the stickiness of grounds. Attending to outer space, my research suggests, is in an irreducible relation to ground.
Contribution long abstract:
Burs. Burs that grow on the vicinity of a telecommunication dish earmarked for conversion into a telescope. Burs that stick to clothes. Burs that cause visitors to bend down while interested in the technologically enhanced potentialities to look up. In my research about astrophysics in Madagascar, I kept being confronted with ground:
(1) the ground of doing research and aspirations to find “common grounds.” Ethnographic research on outer space (away from the ground on which we base our epistemologies, Jue 2020) raises methodological questions.
(2) the ground that intruded into people’s aspirations to study the stars. I became interested in how astro-enthusiasts experience not groundlessness, but an insurmountable pull of locally grounded conditions of austerity. The astrophysicists’ gaze kept being directed away from their object of interest (looking up) and towards the Malagasy grounds
(3) the suitability of grounds for future telescopes. In their ongoing search for ideal grounds for radio telescopes astro-enthusiasts ask how they can minimize the ground’s electro-magnetic influence on data from outer space.
(4) the ground as seen from outer space. satellite images of the ground shape narratives of belonging. Red soil and the ground’s boundedness by an ocean enveloping the island feed into an iconography of Malagasy place.
Burs at the site of a potential future observatory in Madagascar show the stickiness of grounds. Attending to outer space, my research suggests, is in an irreducible relation to ground. For the roundtable, the four points addressed serve as toolkit from which to select when in conversation.
Gabrielle Fenton (UCLouvain)
Contribution short abstract:
The grasslands of the Scheldt’s estuary are located on ground that is continuously done and undone. This intervention explores the contentious role of drainage pumps in this doing and undoing.
Contribution long abstract:
Tidal flows, water shortages and water excesses wash in and out of the dairy grasslands of the estuary, meeting drainage infrastructures and environmental policies. The grasslands themselves are narrated by some as extremely productive ground that will feed the country and by others as necessary space for controlled flooding or water storage. At the end of a rainy winter, many tractors get stuck in heavy mud attempting to spread the first batch of slurry onto the grasslands. Responding to this, the locally elected waterboards attempt to dry them out. Meanwhile, environmentalists are re-wetting the grasslands they have acquired to attract certain species. The wetness of the ground becomes a site of conflict between local stakeholders, its affordances to be ethnographically explored as corresponding “with particular social, economic, and political arrangements” (Krause, 2017: 406).
This intervention proposes to start from an empty can of lubricating grease to reflect on the doing of the grasslands’ ground. The contents of this object was used to grease the bolts of one of the pumps installed by the waterboards between the 1950s and the 1980s. Found amongst many other of its kind, this 50 cm-high empty can highlights the heavy mechanical effort involved in doing ground. The intervention builds on long-term fieldwork following dairy farmers as they tend to the grasslands, encountering wetness and dryness. In particular, it focuses on the contentious role of the centuries-old waterboards that are strongly entangled with the farming communities and currently facing the Flemish government’s decision to dismantle them.
Liviu Chelcea (University of Bucharest)
Contribution short abstract:
The notion of tubular ecologies is useful for understanding the deployment and the limits of terrestrial techniques in the creation of New York City’s ground.
Contribution long abstract:
Working with Matthew Gandy’s notion of “tubular ecologies”, I describe the making of New York City ground in the last three centuries through the use of “terrestrial techniques” aimed at controlling surface and underground waters. While drainage and reclamations projects do control, overall, those waters, the city’s ground stability rests on three intricate networks of: water mains that bring drinking water from outside the city; sewers that transport used water, and former streams and creeks that have been buried underground; and steam pipes that transport superheated steam to buildings in Manhattan from the city’s cogeneration plants. The city’s ground emerged through the construction of these underground tubular ecologies, whose location and state of (dis)repair is not always known to utility companies. Cities complicate our understanding of water under the surface, because of the presence of water transported, leaked, purified or polluted by water infrastructures. Those waters inscribe pipes and the underground ecologies into residents’ consciousness. Tubular ecologies’ visibility and invisibility are interesting ethnographic sites to explore how water is experienced by the city’s residents. That includes the widespread use of domestic water filters because of fear of “old” water mains, projects of daylighting of creeks and streams confined to sewers during the 19th and 20th century, and the absence of trees along the streets where steam pipes are buried. While using a literal understanding of the "ground", an attention to tubular ecologies brings the ethnographic gaze to bear an unexpected objects above ground.
Daniela Ana (Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Economics in Transition Economies)
Contribution short abstract:
This paper explores the interplay between soil degradation and property relations, using a case from the Republic of Moldova to show how property shapes soil care practices and how people understand ailing soils.
Contribution long abstract:
I examine the interplay between agricultural soil degradation and property relations using a case from the Republic of Moldova, a country where agriculture is a key socio-economic activity and soil erosion has become a pervasive problem. For smallholders, in particular, the fragmented plots of land they received after the collapse of the USSR have proved to be an essential means of subsistence in the post-Soviet decades. The further degradation of the land could lead to an increase in food insecurity and would increase the risk of poverty for large sections of the population. On the other hand, Moldovan state officials and soil scientists often describe the current property system as too fragmented and slowing down soil protection strategies. In this context, what meanings and values do smallholders still attach to their fragmented plots of land more than two decades after decollectivisation? In exploring these issues, I make novel connections between the anthropology of property, human-soil relations, and political ecology, showing how property systems and land governance shape soil care practices and ultimately affect the ways in which people understand ailing soils. An image of a striated autumn landscape in Moldova will be a starting point for the reflections.
Alicia Sliwinski (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Contribution short abstract:
This talk examines what the ground means, materially, temporally, and symbolically in a rural region of Cuba addressing issues of resistance and uncertainty from the perspective of smallholder farmers facing multiple forms of crisis.
Contribution long abstract:
This talk explores experiences of the ground and feelings of rootedness in a rural region of Cuba. It addresses issues of resistance and uncertainty from the point of view of longstanding smallholder farmers who have been facing multiscalar forms of crisis. The eastern region of the island, known for its coconut, cacao, and coffee production, had to cope with the destructive impact of a hurricane in 2016, and since then, with a series of unsettling challenges that have ushered a renewed sense of precariousness. Indeed, the compounded effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dramatic drop in tourism and ensuing loss of revenue, the end of the dual currency, inflation accompanied by food shortages and power outages, and the inexorable effects of climate change on agricultural production - all these factors have had adverse effects on local livelihoods and on people’s experiences of being firmly grounded in customary socioecological relational chains and moral economies. This talk will reflect on the notion of the ground as becoming a less predictable and more uncertain bedrock, both materially and symbolically, for local livelihoods, while drawing on local vernaculars that show steadfastness and resistance to multiscalar processes of loss and crisis. The talk would also like to examine how the notion of the ground can be harnessed to shed light on the researcher's engagement with people and with the spatial and temporal premises of core concepts in disaster anthropology.
Elisa Maria López (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
Contribution short abstract:
This roundtable contribution will discuss methodological reflections on, and empirical findings from, a decade of "staying with" a field site defined by collapsing ground: irreversible mine subsidence and mining-induced displacement, resettlement, and urban demolition in Kiruna, Sweden.
Contribution long abstract:
The object I will frame my discussion around is an 11 x 20 cm plastic bag containing magentite iron ore pellets, labeled "LKAB Visitor Centre 20th Anniversary 2018". It was collected at LKAB Kiruna – the world's largest underground iron mine – operated by the Swedish state-owned mining company LKAB. Each day, 15 trains of 68 wagons loaded with these pellets depart from LKAB Kiruna, one of two mines in the Swedish Ore Fields that produce 80 percent of the iron in the E.U. The mine is also the largest employer in Kiruna, Sweden's northernmost city. Since 2004, Kiruna has faced the ongoing displacement and resettlement of six thousand residents due to irreversible earth deformations caused by LKAB's mining.
This bag will frame my discussion of what un/re/grounding looks like for both Kiruna residents and myself as an anthropologist studying this process for the last twelve years: what it has meant to stay with a place being destroyed by the industry it was established to support, and whom the community still relies on. I consider the ways my interlocutors and I engage Kiruna in the spirit of Sven Lindquist's 1978 call to "dig where you stand", exploring community histories of mining, labor, and the city to identify greater transformations in community and corporate relations. Finally, I will reflect on methodological challenges, insights, and lessons drawn from doing anthropology of and on Kiruna's shifting grounds, particularly post-2015 when urban demolition and population resettlement entered a more active phase.
Andrea Bordoli (University of Bern)
Contribution short abstract:
The proposed object is an archival aerial image found at the McGill Subarctic Research Station, Schefferville, Northern Québec. I will evoke a discussion that originated around it during fieldwork to reflect on matters of grounding/ungrounding in the context of settler/indigenous relationships.
Contribution long abstract:
The proposed object is an archival aerial image that was lying with hundreds of others in one of the abandoned buildings of the McGill Subarctic Research Station, Schefferville, Northern Québec. The image was part of an aerial photography campaign carried out by the Canadian state's Department of Energy, Mines and Resources during the second half of the XXth century. It was collected during a recent fieldwork trip in 2022/2023.
The picture represent a black and white landscape from above. It is a landscape from the area surrounding Schefferville, a remote mining region at the heart the Labrador Through, an iron-rich region spanning across Labrador and Northern Québec. The photograph carries a number and is marked by a copyright, "Her Majesty The Queen in Right of Canada".
I propose to discuss an ethnographic vignette that originated from the day in which I brought this photograph with me to share it with some of my closest fieldwork interlocutors in Matimekush Lac-John, the Innu community adjacent to Schefferville. I would like to describe the photograph not directly, by its visible features, but rather obliquely, via the discussion that originated around it on that specific day. Departing from the photograph, this proposition opens up a space to think about contrasting experiences to ground(s) and/or "the Land", its representations and ownership claims, as well as to evoke the complex network of grounding/ungrounding forces mobilised during the parallel processes of "setting up" the settler state and of dispossession of Indigenous territories.