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Paper short abstract:

Which are the practical and political roots of salvage accumulation? Drawing on the case of heather uprooting in Western Mediterranean, we explore the ecologies, overlapping temporalities, skills and moral economies involved in human-environmental relations of current mountain worlds.

Paper long abstract:

Tree heather (Erica arborea) is a shrub species whose hard root is used for making smoking pipes and dog toys which are sold globally. The whole material for these industries comes from its collection in specific, relatively humid mountain forests around the Mediterranean. Since that collection in the wild is usually carried out by precarious local workers on their own, this supply chain is a good example of what Tsing (2015) terms “salvage accumulation”. Approaches to this concept up to now have hardly dealed with the practical and somatic experiences of the human-environmental relations involved. In this paper we try to further its analytical potentialities and, drawing on the case of heather uprooting in the Andalusian mountains (Spain), ask: What is, in practice, involved in these relations? Which ecologies, overlapping temporalities, human skills and social arrangements make possible heather collection? In that sense, through a phenomenological lens, we explore the operations and work rythms put into practice in what we term person-pickaxe-heather system following Bateson (1973). Likewise, within an ethnographic context characterised by the predominance of large estates, we show the relevance of land access through a focus on workers’ movements and their tensions and (tacit) agreements with landowners. They seem to build on a moral economy operating as a long-lasting (and unstable) balance. In short, we explore uprooting in order to address some of the roots of current more-than-human worlds in the Mediterranean mountains.