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Short abstract:

By approaching soils as infrastructure, this paper examines the multispecies relationships between soils and sheep in the shadow of intensified agriculture and politics of rural and agrarian change in Norway.

Long abstract:

In this paper, I suggest that a conceptual approach to soils as infrastructures can help us rethink multispecies ethnographies. Soils as infrastructures frame soils as “structures of contact and circulation” (Barua, 2021: 1483), and “matter that enable the movement of other matter” (Larkin, 2013: 329). Soils as infrastructures centres the diverse materiality of soils, the role of both humans and nonhumans, as well as the relationship between the “built” and “natural” world (Rippa, 2023: 16).

Soils are dynamic compounds consisting of many other species as well as metabolic and chemical processes, providing key ecosystem functions for biodiversity as well as human survival. In Norwegian outfields, soils have enabled and co-evolved with the movement of sheep, who have fertilised the soil and spread seeds through their faeces, cutting grass with their teeth and promoting photosynthesis by keeping landscapes open (Blix 2018). However, the relationship between soils and sheep has begun to erode.

Through an ethnography of grazing, soils as infrastructure places multispecies ethnographies alongside studies of power relations and politics. I begin in the Norwegian outfields, the contact zone between soils and sheep, to explore how industrialised agriculture has caused ruptures in multispecies relations. Changes in agricultural politics demonstrate how multispecies relations are in active engagement with socio-political processes. In this way, I see soils as infrastructures as way of “making things possible”, which opens an analytical space for understanding shifting material processes through both ethnographic, political, and historical attention to specific multispecies relations through the movement of matter.