Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores human-lithic intimacy and acts of bereavement within the science of paleontology that open possibilities for nonviolent ways of being in the geological sciences and industries.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation explores human-lithic intimacy within the science of paleontology in the contemporary United States. It takes as its ethnographic touchstone my observations of the grief that paleontologists, fossil excavators and preparators feel for the long-dead animals whose fossilized remains they work with. In these moments, unburying, cleaning, and preparing fossils for storage are affective acts of bereavement as much as they are scientific practices. To understand this form of mourning, I bring Butler’s grievability (Butler 2009) and Ogden’s “affective resonance” (2021) into conversation with Myers’ analysis of scientific research as “a full-bodied practice” in which “seeing, feeling, and knowing are entangled” (2008, 2). As a subfield of geology, paleontology offers a counterpoint to discussions of geological exploitation and the violence of geological relations. I present human-lithic intimacy as a relation of “geontopower” (Povinelli 2016), but one that does not abide the distinction between bios (life) and geos (nonlife) that Povinelli argues is crucial to modern power. Moreover, the human-lithic intimacy that exists within paleontology opens possibilities for nonviolent ways of being in the geological sciences and industries more broadly.