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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:
Residents of Ghana's eroding Volta delta resist the conversion of their natal town to a high-class resort. As delta sand accretes and subsides, residents find political possibilities in the novelty of freshly dredged ground.
Paper long abstract:
In 2013, Government of Ghana (GoG) leased land in Kedzi, a Volta estuary fishing village, to Trasacco Estates Development Company Ltd. (TEDC) for resort and marina development. Touted as the Dangme East District’s answer to GoG’s “One District, One Factory” initiative, the project threatens to displace thousands of delta residents and destroy sea turtle nesting habitat on a coast already ravaged by erosion. In the seven years since TEDC’s acquisition, the venture has repeatedly stalled and remains an uncertain possibility. My ethnography thus explores the social world assembled around this project and its prospects. Using the words and stories of the people of Kedzi, this paper recasts the history of this eroding delta and its relationship to the developmental aspirations of the state through the vantage of sand. Sand accretes and subsides with the tides; is heaped, dredged, mined, obstructed, and flattened by a state intent on controlling the water’s movements to save habitats and make profitable property. With each change of this shifting sandscape, residents, entrepreneurs, chiefs, developers, and bureaucrats reterritorialize the land that emerges. This history highlights the difficulty of defining property lines in a place where the boundary between land and water is perpetually in flux. In the novelty of freshly dredged ground, residents find openings in GoG’s natural resource bureaucracy to claim protections from a state that may otherwise allow their displacement.
Paper short abstract:
By applying a sensory-ethnographic and posthumanistic approach, I examine the Southern Kashubian landscape from the perspective of sand, by following its transversal paths and attuned matter. My aim is to show how sand and humans interact, and how they impose their regimes onto each other.
Paper long abstract:
Although Southern Kashubia is mainly noted for its lakes and forests, there is another, at first sight inconspicuous, elemental actor, which turns out to be even more dominant: the sand. By applying a sensory-ethnographic and posthumanistic approach, I examine the landscape from the perspective of sand, following its transversal paths, nomadic tendencies, and listening to its eloquent and attuned matter.
The sand, mostly invisible in its everydayness and proximity, comes to the fore in various ways: vagabonding, it creeps into every possible niche and sets itself in motion while interacting with other elements. When a sand mound piled up by heavy machinery starts to slide during intense rainfall and buries the adjacent farmland, the sand's highhanded behaviour unsettles the residents who start to oppose the sand-regime: by channelling the pathways of sand and water or by covering an unruly dirt track with a firm asphalt layer. However, as soon as the work is completed, the sand, dancing with other elements, enters the stage and destroys it from the edges. Thereby the sand not only undermines human regimes and order systems, but actually reveals them occasionally. Hence, the sand filling the air narrates about the droughts caused by climate change and thus articulates anthropocene processes.
In a perspectivistic mode, I portray the interaction between sand and humans, firstly "from the activity" of the sand, secondly "from the activity" of the human addressed, and thirdly by integrating both perspectives within the notion Stimmung (attunement), into which both, humans and sand, are immersed.
Paper short abstract:
Building on one case of erosion, I'll try to render the plurality of relations and voices shaping complex coastal processes. Anthropological insights can help in grasping the entanglements of large and fine dynamics, rising situated questions on temporalities, ecologies and cultural imaginaries.
Paper long abstract:
Sand : such a short word reflecting such a complex articulation, between geological, socio-ecological, economic, political and cultural processes.
A growing concern with sand arises in society debates at the global level and, since a few years, some calls alerting about severe sand loss are relayed by media and scientific journals. Beside general alarms and phenomena, anthropological observation and situated knowledges can help in grasping the entanglements of large and fine dynamics. At the same time, they can also rise specific questions concerning cultural imaginaries and seemingly irreconcilable temporalities.
Building on one case of coastal erosion taking place in a mediterranean archipelago (la Maddalena National Park, Sardinia), I'll try to render the plurality of relations and voices shaping coastal processes. Those are particularly complex ones, compising the interactions between posidonia oceanica meadows and dune systems, and multiple human started processes (from consequences of boat anchorages to water pollution, from daily massive visiting to preservationist closing).
How - and how slowly - is sand formed in specific contexts? Why are some white, sandy beaches much more desired than others? Which institutional and legal configurations are brought lo life in relation to the particular color of a microorganism, giving to sand a peculiar pink nuance? How are imaginaries and scientific knowledges involved in multi-scale economic and political struggles? Those and other questions can take shape from the observation of a surprising, polyphonic context, in which sand becomes the pivotal point of long-lasting socio-ecological processes.
Paper short abstract:
From archival traces of dust-prevention policies to an ethnography of daily life around gold pits, this paper places current iterations of granular substances (i.e. sand, dust) in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo against a wider colonial and post-colonial history.
Paper long abstract:
For an artisanal miner in Kamituga, South-Kivu, the texture of a sandy subsoil is an indicator of the potential presence of gold. Sand may indicate wealth. When gold pits ‘vibrate’ (produce), muddy sand will be unearthed and crushed. In this process of retrieving auriferous 'sand', waste rock turns dry and its granular size becomes smaller. This produces a harmful, airborne, and less visible residual. Examining a miner’s lung, we find, in the words of the 18th century doctor Ramazzini, “sand-like substances” (silica), becoming only ‘perceptible’ through the depiction of lesions on X-ray scans, bloody sputum, and eventually the diagnosis of silicosis.
Drawing from archival research and extensive fieldwork in the region, this paper first digs into an often-forgotten trace of Belgian colonial history: the place of dust prevention in colonial policies of hygiene. Next, it swerves into the present. Colonial infrastructures have turned into abject ruins, but sand-clouds and other toxic fumes are on the rise in the artisanal miner’s use of crushers, drills, and engines. Finally, it travels out of the workplace. Dust-clouds flare up underneath trucks transporting valuable ‘sand’ on decrepit colonial roads. Travelers on foot cover their orifices or take shortcuts to avoid larger ones.
Irrespective of its chemical composition, talk and attunements in Congolese mining towns often revolve around ‘granular’ substances (flour, dust, powder, “schmoke”, sand). Wavering between a harmful and a valuable presence, this paper places these elements into a wider history of colonial policies and infrastructures, and post-colonial technologies and embodied tactics.