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- Convenors:
-
Samuli Lähteenaho
(University of Helsinki)
Brenda Chalfin (University of Florida and Aarhus University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Posthumanism
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Anthropology is in the midst of an emerging interest in elemental matters, a move in which sand claims a rightful place. The panel calls for papers in which sand is not a background condition but a prominent player in cultural renderings, political contests, and economic and environmental processes.
Long Abstract:
In the context of the anthropocene and the ontological turn, anthropology demands a new conceptual compass. From water, to wind, to air, to energopower, and the spores of matsutake, the discipline is in the midst of an emerging interest in elemental matters. This is a move in which sand claims a rightful place. Fluid, granular, ancient yet ever-changing, sand is the primal soup of civilization, stabilizing settlements, and anchoring subsistence. Sediments of past lives and the earth's deep ecologies, in sand the distinction between animal and mineral collapse, as does the border of land and sea, erosion and accumulation. The panel calls for papers in which sand is not a background condition but a prominent player in cultural renderings, political contests, and economic and environmental processes. Inspired by new work in media studies, environmental science, urban design, and material culture, the panel joins these fields to move sand from substrate to subject matter. It asks, what might an anthropology of sand attuned to the elemental forms and forces of human existence look like in contrast to anthropologies of place tuned to terra firma or the ether of virtual worlds? Whether matters of coastal development and destruction, or arid zones where sand is intimately familiar yet increasingly unsettled, papers should interrogate the connection between 'new earthly troubles' and 'things in the world' including the sandy composites of the present. Like sand, they mix the particulates of post-consumer and post-industrial waste with organic matter to create renegade biomes and novel terraforms.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This presentation follows the uneven accumulation and flow of post-industrial and human waste particulates through the rivers of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to ground the instability and heterogeneity of urban political relations in urban terrain.
Paper long abstract:
Today, Addis Ababa is under renovation following the personal visions of Dr. Abiy Ahmed, recent Nobel Peace Prize winner and Prime Minister of Ethiopia. While infrastructural debates in Ethiopia often center on highways, railroads and dams, I am concerned with ‘urban natures,’ particularly urban riverways and green corridors. At the heart of my discussion is “Beautifying Sheger”—Dr. Abiy’s personal initiative to rehabilitate rivers and stimulate riverbasin economies that speaks as much to issues of managing urban growth and urban natures as it does the political project of state building. As the space where the wastes of industrial parks and the neighborhood seep in, coagulate and mount up, rancid riverbeds have held the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in their noxious grip for decades. This presentation follows post-industrial and human waste particulates as they move downstream to understand the ways in which sanitation in the city is experienced and politicized through sediment. Drawing from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork within three riverside slums, I illustrate how the rhythm and processes of accumulation and erosion of mineral and chemical deposits in urban riverbeds echo the varied, multifarious and unpredictability of urban terrain and the instability and heterogeneity of urban political relations.
Paper short abstract:
At the public beach in Beirut sand is an ever present material fact. In this paper I examine how the materiality of sand becomes intermingled with other material and social presences. Sand becomes an affective matter, and thus has an effect on the relative location of the beach within the city.
Paper long abstract:
At the public beach in Beirut, Lebanon, sand is an ever present total material fact. Storied to have arrived from Sahara through sea currents, sand at the beach grounds all engagement, leisure, and grief to be experienced. Named the White Sands, they were once part of a wider stretch of sandy ground on the flank of the expanding city. What remains of the sands have grown to take a central place in urban politics as the 'last public beach' of Beirut, and appropriated for the neoliberal urbanism of the tourist industry and stolen for construction. In this paper I examine how the materiality of sand becomes intermingled with other materials and social presences. Sand becomes an affective matter, and thus in turn has an effect on the relative location of the beach within the city.
In my discussion I foreground the sands of the beach. Through intermingling with micro-plastics, sewage and other forms of waste the sands become dirty, drastically changing their class status and relationship with rest of the city. Through mixing with medical waste and broken glass, the sands can become dangerous, a risk environmentalists caring for the beach strive to avert. I propose that the sands require labor of care to make them pleasing and pure, but that this work is constant and precarious and mixed with environmental contradiction as ecosystems remain nested in the mix of sand and plastic. With care, the sands can become pleasing to touch and live with, even therapeutic.
Paper short abstract:
By analysing land reclamation through the activity of sand, the contribution focuses on the reciprocal relationships between sand as an economic project, geopolitical marker, and stage of resistance and how its granular physics complicates prescriptive human-material relationships.
Paper long abstract:
Emphasising granularity as a boundary condition, my work pays attention to the ever-shifting state of sand and by extension the symbolic, economic and political meaning attached to it. Touching upon fieldwork conducted in Malacca, Malaysia in 2020, the contribution will trace sand as an economic project, a geopolitical intricacy, and a stage for resistance. Land reclamation as a practice that aims at solidifying sand as land mass is read against its material activity. Sand's incommensurability — the quality of being solid and liquid at once — allows for a simultaneous view of destruction and creation, exploitation, and transformation.
Having been the former trading hub in the Strait of Malacca, with the British colonisation of Singapore and its independence and economic growth since 1965, Malacca today is hugely a ghost town developing land and estate in anticipation of a brighter future. Investments to renew interest in Malacca as UNESCO heritage site mingle with ambitions to connect it to The Belt and Road Initiative. The case of Malacca forecloses the complex relationship between the national and transnational interests, land reclamation, and unintended side effects. In the shadow of "failed" reclamation projects, local fishermen gain political agency and mudfish start to flourish.
The example illustrates how sand is rendered operational as an economic and political marker and how an emphasis on its granular physics allows to productively rethink prescriptive human-material relationships.
Paper short abstract:
Deep-sea sediments are much more than matter that settles at the bottom of the ocean. For ocean scientists, they tell stories of the future of the world. I engage in the use of sediments as foretellers and explore the emerging economy of prediction they support.
Paper long abstract:
In the last years, the world has turned to the ocean with apprehension, not only because of its ecological degradation but because of what it “tells.” Terraqueous accumulators of multiple matter, deep-sea sediments embody stories of the world. Ocean scientists claim to access pasts and presents of the Earth by working with marine sediments. Yet such sediments are more than material archives, registers of what has already happened: they also foretell the Earth’s future. Indeed, for ocean scientists, deep-sea sediments work as a sort of “crystal ball” that reveals the world to come. This coincides with the rise of a new powerful culture and economy of prediction that converts the future into a rational instrument of modern authority. I explore the relationship between (1) sedimentation as a more-than-human terraqueous process of stories’ creation and (2) the scientific use of sediments as foretellers to moralize intervention in the present.