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Paper short abstract

Mud challenges dichotomies, such as life/nonlife and past/future. Drawing on the 2019 Brumadinho dam collapse, this paper traces tailings mud across landscapes, affects, and law, showing how repair and responsibility unfold as ongoing negotiations with material temporalities beyond linear time.

Paper long abstract

Mud disrupts established dichotomies, such as those between life and nonlife, water and earth, nature and infrastructure, as well as past and future. Mud resists containment, measurement, and categorization, yet it simultaneously demands political and legal responses. Instead of treating mud as inert residue or mere ecological waste, this paper recognizes it as a sedimentary assemblage encapsulating deep time, extractive economies, and negotiations of human and nonhuman futures. In this vein, the paper anthropologically explores the mud spilled by the collapse of a tailings dam in Brumadinho, a mining community in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The mud released in January 2019 profoundly altered the local landscape, infrastructure, and social relations. Seven years later, the tailings mud still lingers in riverbeds, as dust, in bodies, in legal files, and in everyday conversations about repair and responsibility. Against this backdrop, the paper examines how mud becomes tangible and subject to scrutiny or is neglected in sociolegal processes to achieve "full reparation" following the dam collapse in Brumadinho. By tracing the mud across scales—from mineral sediments to affective experiences—the paper reveals that repair and responsibility defy linear temporality. Rather, they emerge as ongoing negotiations with earthly materials whose temporalities extend beyond human planning and legal timeframes. Addressing mud as both matter and metaphor, the paper proposes an anthropology from the ground up, examining sedimented histories and uneven temporal alignments in the wake of extractivism and its collapse.