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- Convenors:
-
Oliwia Murawska
(Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck)
Manuel Trummer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich (LMU))
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Short Abstract
In this panel, we will explore narrative representations of the “elemental” in the Anthropocene. We ask how human entanglements with environments experienced as elemental are narrated or to what extent elemental substances are conceived as narrative agents that grant us access to the posthuman.
Long Abstract
In the context of the posthuman and material turns, the elements are experiencing a renaissance. Especially considering theories of the “Anthropocene”, the perception of the elements through narratives assumes a particular significance in humanity’s engagement with its surrounding environments.
In this panel, we will explore narrative representations of the “elemental” within the Anthropocene. We will ask how human entanglements with environments experienced as elemental – rivers, deserts, glaciers, etc. – are narrated, how the elemental manifests in stories, or to what extent elemental substances are conceived as narrative agents that grant us access to the “ecologies of the inhuman” (Cohen).
Consequently, the ancient four-element schema, a fundamental mode of understanding nature in the global north, is challenged in the context of Anthropocene. The elements, once believed to be domesticated, are increasingly experienced in unprecedented modes of articulation, accelerated by Anthropos. They can hardly be imagined in their purity anymore, but rather in their nature-cultural entanglements or contaminations. What role do fire, water, earth, and air play in contemporary and traditional narratives about nature? What other, anthropogenic substances are conceived as elemental, like rare earths, lithium, plastic? To what extent does elemental storytelling open up post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic possibilities for us to respond to the ecological crises – heat, floods, droughts – of our time?
The panel invites all those who wish to discuss the connection between the elements and the narration of nature in the context of the Anthropocene from a contemporary or historical perspective.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Sunday 14 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
Elemental narratives in Iceland frame climate interventions like carbon mineralization as natural processes, yet also provoke unease. This ambivalence shows how elemental storytelling endures in the Anthropocene, complicating distinctions between nature, technology, and risk.
Paper long abstract
In Iceland, proponents of climate interventions frequently mobilize elemental narratives to present new technologies as analogues of natural processes. Carbon mineralization, for instance, is framed as harnessing Iceland’s distinctive geology to accelerate the “natural” bonding of carbon with rock beneath the surface. Such framings seek to capture the positive associations of how elemental forces have contributed to Icelandic society through renewable energy, tourism, and climate responses. They also resonate with studies of geothermal and wind power as elemental forces shaping Icelandic life, and with scholarship on infrastructures as more-than-human assemblages or naturecultures.
Yet Icelandic elemental narratives have long been ambivalent, marked by both reverence and fear—whether of advancing glaciers or erupting volcanoes. Contemporary climate interventions inherit this ambivalence. While carbon mineralization is cast as natural, residents express unease at tampering with elemental forces, raising concerns about induced earthquakes, damage to lava formations, or water contamination. These anxieties point to how elemental tropes both naturalize and destabilize emerging climate technologies.
In this sense, the Anthropocene has not displaced elemental imaginaries with purely modernist notions of controllable nature. Instead, climate interventions intensify awareness of the elements as lively, indeterminate, and entangled with human infrastructures. Icelanders’ responses reveal how narratives of earth, fire, and water continue to structure ecological imaginaries, while simultaneously unsettling boundaries between nature and technology, reverence and risk, the classical elements and modern chemicals like carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and other pollutants.
Paper short abstract
The element of wood is narrativized as ancient by those who encounter very large trees, imagined as part of a gigantic and inhuman landscape, integrating them into a geological sublime shared by Romantic poets as well as scientists and whetting extractivist and commercial appetites.
Paper long abstract
While forests in Europe are natural-cultural environments, mixing recreational and economic usages, many of their meanings emerge from narratives of them as elemental, i.e. as a substance foundational for human existence. Trees produce wood (in some Asian traditions wood is actually named as one of the five elements), a material used for fuel, buildings, and everyday objects that is indispensable as an (in some ways anthropogenic) element. Thus, forests and trees become deeply entangled with human life as well as with the other elements: earth, wind, water, and fire.
This presentation will focus on narratives shared by foresters, botanists, and travelers who encounter old and often very large trees. Such elemental beings as the ‘1000-year oak’ in Germany or the giant redwoods of California are imagined as part of a ‘gigantic’ landscape, integrating them into a rockier ‘geological sublime’ shared by Romantic poets as well as scientists. The ancient, enormous tree, categorized by foresters as a ‘natural monument’ – a deliberately oxymoronic, Humboldtian term – bridges human and geological time by representing a primordial, ‘inhuman’ age in which megafauna wandered among megaflora. At the same time, the trees represent an enormous elemental, woody resource whetting the appetites of extraction and commercialization. The paper will connect with Pamela Klassen’s on Elemental Religion by looking at the cosmologies in which these endeavors are embedded, reflected in narratives which Naveeda Khan describes as experiments in “commensurating humans to the geological”, including the reality of our species as a geophysical force on the planet.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyses how gold rush heritage sites in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States narrate settler discoveries of gold as a kind of “elemental religion,” enabling and participating in the alchemy of empire: shape-shifting Indigenous land into settler colonies.
Paper long abstract
Settler discoveries of gold are celebrated, narrated, and materialized at heritage sites in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States, all former British colonies. In this paper, I consider how these narratives of gold embed an “elemental religion” into the landscape that enables the alchemy of empire: the process of shape-shifting Indigenous land into settler colonies through violence, law, science, and stories.
This paper asks why nineteenth-century gold mines and their toxic remainders—mercury poisoning, deforestation, colonial violence—are persistently transfigured into state-supported sites of nationalist public memory in countries such as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. I center the concept of “elemental religion,” or the ways that cosmologies shape human relations with minerals, lands, and waters, building on Elizabeth Povinelli's concept of “geontologies.” Alchemy, as a spiritual/scientific quest to transmute baser metals into gold, is also an apt metaphor for how gold mining has helped to transform Indigenous territories into settler colonies. Attending to narratives of miners, surveyors, missionaries, and Indigenous people, this paper pays attention to gold rush memory as elemental religion to illuminate how Christian-inflected cosmologies of land sanctified colonial jurisdiction and Indigenous land theft by way of a providential God. My focus on elemental religion also reveals how geology is a “secular science” with its own cosmologies of land--a geological sublime--that imagined and visualized the earth’s vast ages against biblical time, exposing ancient rocks to resource extraction. This paper is in conversation with Monique Scheer's "Megaflora and the Geological Sublime: Elemental Narratives of Primordial Trees."
Paper short abstract
This paper explores Bengali 'Mangalkabya' as a crucible of elemental narration, where earth, water, fire, air, and animals act as sacred agents, advancing decolonial epistemologies and posthuman ecologies for the Anthropocene.
Paper long abstract
Indian cosmological imaginaries conceptualize the natural world as an ontologically vibrant and agentic matrix, wherein rivers, mountains, celestial configurations, and animal species manifest as agential interlocutors integral to the cyclical constitution of cosmic order and ethical regeneration. This paper foregrounds historically neglected South Asian paradigms—the ritual veneration of serpents, tigers, and avifauna—as exemplars of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “multinaturalism,” revealing a pluriversal landscape that systematically disrupts anthropocentric epistemic monopolies and reconfigures agency as diffuse and distributed across matter. Such entanglements, rendered legible through indigenous taxonomies of purity, pollution, and sacred geography, align with Bruno Latour’s imperative to subvert the entrenched nature/culture binary, thus reorienting ecology as an assemblage of co-constitutive agencies and situated knowledges.
Despite their epistemological fecundity, South Asian cosmological traditions are persistently marginalized in the architecture of global ecological theory. Indigenous textual ecologies, however, are not inert folkloric substrates but rigorous archives of ontological critique, offering decolonial correctives to paradigms of extraction, separation, and human exceptionalism characteristic of Eurocentric thought. In this cosmopolitical terrain, Bengali 'Mangalkabya' emerge as vital repositories of “species history” (Chakrabarty), where elemental and nonhuman actors—rivers elevated as sentient caretakers, tempests as juridical disruptions, forests as sentinels of ethical reciprocity, and animals as moral interlocutors—are intricately enmeshed in planetary relationalities opposing extractivist logics. 'Mangalkabya' thus enact an eco-hermeneutics predicated on relational materialism and immanence, challenging reified binaries, and inaugurating cosmopolitical imaginaries imperative to reimagining Anthropocene ethics as fundamentally plural, situated, and ecologically attuned.
Paper short abstract
Water’s forms shape mountainscapes intensely. Its flows call for a post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic understanding of the ways in which water emerges, expands, contracts, and lingers among the human and nonhuman. What does it mean to narrate from the perspective of water’s forms?
Paper long abstract
Water’s forms shape mountainscapes intensely. From glaciers to permafrost to rivers and the molding of landscapes, water in mountain terrain has affected humans through its beauty and utility. It has inspired narratives that have contributed to an attractive imagistic infrastructure which entices visitors. And humans have enlisted it in the development of an appealing physical infrastructure that accommodates these visitors. Such narratives and infrastructure have projected a false sense of acquiescence and human control over water’s forms. This has become increasingly salient through ecological crises that have laid bare its ability to rapidly or gradually exert its own forces, contrary to human desires. What does it mean to narrate from the perspective of water’s forms? And how does one approach the naming of water’s forms, whose multiplicities and movements defy nomenclatures and demand continuous description?
The flows of water’s forms over, under, and into each other at various elevations throughout the mountain environment call for a post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic understanding of the ways in which water emerges, expands, contracts, and lingers among the human and nonhuman. The earth and air of mountain terrain both shape and are shaped by water’s forms. These and the anthropogenic plastics and metals of human interventions are elements essential to narrating the force of the contaminations that have deepened the nature-cultural entanglements of water’s forms in mountainscapes. I examine these emergences through the lens of empirical research in the mountainous environments of Tirol, Austria and the North Caucasus, Russia.
Paper short abstract
The film “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” opens with the destruction of the marble mountains in Italy. For the quarriers and stone carvers of Pietrasanta, human and earth are entangled and embodied, mutually coexisting and disappearing.
Paper long abstract
The cover shot of the film “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” depicts the destruction of the marble mountains above Carrara and Pietrasanta, Italy. It’s a searing, dramatic, aerial image of hatchback roads cutting up the huge mountain range. It’s an image of destruction, wrought by centuries of human extraction. I explore the multiple intersecting narratives of embodied knowledge, political events, and natural history told by quarriers and artisan stone carvers over a period of centuries.
For the quarriers and stone carvers who work there, and who I have studied for the past 40 years, the story, told over several centuries, from the earliest stories of conquering the mountain and risking lives, to contemporary efforts to protect the mountains, is more complex; the quarriers and carvers celebrate and revere marble as a living material, just as they extract it. Human and earth coexist and constitute embodied, and disappearing, knowledge.
Carving stone, even with the aid of pneumatic tools, is a hand-based, embodied, practice. The human practice of carving and the marble, extracted from the mountain, coexist and constitute embodied, and disappearing, knowledge. The narrative entanglements of marble and artisan converge and compete; they celebrate marble as a living material; they revere the mountain, as dangerous and glorious; and they acknowledge and lament the contemporary disappearance of both the mountain and artisan knowledge.
Paper short abstract
The study examines the 'hunting fire' as a narrative and a material figure in the Anthropocene. Drawing upon ethnographic data, it offers a nuanced interpretation of fire as a instrument, demonstrating its role in mediating between care, danger and pleasure.
Paper long abstract
Recent years have seen an increase in the number of female hunters in Germany. A comprehensive set of data has been collated through a series of interviews, participant observations and a thorough analysis of social media posts. This has enabled the identification of a diverse array of everyday hunting activities. In this paper, the 'hunting fire' is discussed as both a narrative and a material figure of the elemental in the Anthropocene. Drawing upon an extensive ethnographic corpus pertaining to the subject of hunts in northwestern Germany, this study examines in detail the intricate relationship between fire and the emotional dimensions inherent to the transformation of fire into a hunting implement. Although fire is presented as a primordial element in classical elemental teachings, in the context of hunting, it takes on a mechanised and controlled form, yet remains inherently unpredictable, thus entwining life and death. The 'hunting fire' thus marks a node that trancends humanistic ways of thinking: it constitutes subjectivations of both the hunters and the hunted animals and opens up interaction processes between human and non-human actors. It is evident that the fundamental act of discharging a firearm, when regarded an integral part of hunting and simultaneously legitimised by safety discourses, evinces an ambivalent oscillation between care, danger and pleasure ('hunting fever'). The presentation proposes an analysis of the hunting fire as a contaminated, cultural-natural element in the Anthropocene, which opens up new approaches of analysing power, affect and materiality in human-environmental relations.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research in the Palatinate forest (Germany), the presentation explores how the forest—conzeptualized as an intermediate zone between air, water, and soil—is narrated as an entity that both opens and closes hopes and imaginations of the future in its rural communities.
Paper long abstract
The Palatinate Forest (Pfälzerwald) is one of the largest contiguous forests in Germany. Over recent decades, its rural communities have experienced a severe decline in infrastructures such as shops, banks, and medical services. While such developments are common, the forest itself regularly becomes part of the stories people tell: as an intermediate zone between air, water, and soil, the forest and its elemental entanglements emerge as an affective environment that has shaped histories and is shaping futures.
Drawing on ethnographic research on food landscapes and infrastructures in two Palatinate communities, I explore how the forest’s presence is narrated in relation to (lost) hopes and imaginations. Outsiders often describe it as enclosing: residents lack a literal and metaphorical horizon due to the surrounding mountains, trees, and fog. Within the communities, however, the forest appears as a highly contested landscape (Bender/Winer 2001). For some, it is a source of new hopes—an environment producing oxygen and purifying water, it is imagined as an anthropocenic retreat for tourists and (future) inhabitants, making life possible even in times of climate change.
Yet these visions collide with nature protection laws that restrict required infrastructures. The forest thus opens and closes imaginations of the future at once. Weaving together these narratives of “everyday lives at the infrastructure-environment nexus” (Ojani/Ullberg/Vonderau 2024: 10), I highlight how the Palatinate Forest is not merely a setting but a dynamic actor in narrations on the possibilities and limits of living with and in a “third nature”, one despite capitalism (Tsing 2015: viii).