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Paper short abstract

This anthropological paper examines how various people come to live and work with the remainders of housing in late industrial urban America (United States). In particular, I consider the narrative practices that render decaying and destroyed housing a "re-naturalized" grounds of engagement.

Paper long abstract

How do people come to self-consciously engage with the leftovers of industrial life and abandonment? This anthropological paper examines the narrative tropes through which various people come to live and work with the remainders of housing abandonment, decay, and destruction in the late industrial urban Midwest of the United States. I consider how differently positioned salvagers “re-naturalize” landscapes already profoundly altered through urban industrialization, expansion, and abandonment during the 20th century. In particular, I focus on salvagers who understand their work as a kind of pre-industrial lumbering or quarrying. What kind of “grounds” do such narrative re-naturalizations obscure and open up? What kinds of practices (metaphorical, embodied, ethical etc.) do they encourage? How might these practices help us refine our understandings of “second” or “third” nature at a moment more and more people are coming to terms with the direction, degree, and scale of anthropogenic ecological change?