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- Convenors:
-
Dominic Boyer
(Rice University)
Cymene Howe (Rice University)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Timothy Neale
(Deakin University)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Location:
- Eucalyptus (S205), R.N Robertson Building
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 3 December, -, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
For a variety of reasons, anthropologists and others have been recently drawn to rethink the 'elemental' basis of our lives and surrounds. This panel will explore the value (and limits) of thinking about the social worlds of elemental or fundamental 'things'.
Long Abstract:
Extractive landscapes running short on resources. More-than-human cultures slipping out of their established climatic envelopes. Explorations into, and experiments with, the core components of our bodily chemistry. For a variety of reasons, humanities scholars, social scientists, and others have been recently drawn to rethink the 'elemental' basis of our lives and surrounds. Against critical impulses that foreground the emergent, anthropologists and others are starting to ask: "what is elemental to this moment?"
We count (roughly) three senses of the elemental. In the first sense, elements are discrete chemical entities, like those named and schematised in the Periodic Table of Elements which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. In the second sense, the elemental names the environmental milieu, or material substrate, in which we are irrevocably embedded, in which different forms of life are immersed, enveloped, and take shape. The third sense of the elemental is the ontological one, the philosophical correlate of the first. Here, the elemental is not a material resource or background, but is a claim about the conditions-of-possibility of being and matter themselves. For an elemental philosophy, there are forces or forms of matter from which every other material is derived.
At once, the elemental situates us, embeds us, and is beyond us. This panel seeks contributions that explore the value (and limits) of thinking about the social worlds of elemental or fundamental 'things'. This may involve focusing on a particular chemical, substance, process, spirit, mineral, plant, climate, body, commodity, or other elemental entity.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 2 December, 2019, -Andrew Fahey
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores a new form of the comparative method - controlled comparison - and its implications both for coming to terms with the typical elements of anthropological study as well as addressing several classic philosophical antinomies from a fresh perspective.
Paper long abstract:
The comparative method has a long history in Anthropology beginning with many amateur ethnologists through to Durkheim, Levi-Strauss and beyond. The classic application of the method which compared categories – such as marriage, class, politics, ritual and the like – between two or more cultures aimed to generate transcendent facts about these categories, and in the process make definite claims about others as entirely penetrable elements in a comprehensive study of the human species.
Understandably this method – and its metaphysical claims to transcendent and objective insights into the worlds of others – has come under sustained criticism in recent times. However, in order to escape the impasse of alternative methods (such as deconstructionism and its positive correlate in intersectional identity politics) I am proposing a methodological and metaphysical modification to the act of comparison.
By containing two or more objects in a controlled comparison (be they cultures, beings, black holes or otherwise) it may be possible to make definite claims about each insofar as these claims are also contained within the comparative relation. In this way positive, objective knowledge becomes an imminent element of the comparison, whilst the objects of the comparison always transcend total description.
This method of controlled comparison may be a way for anthropology to return to generating positive knowledge about the elemental aspects of the world (including, but not confined to the classic objects of culture, society and so forth) whilst bearing in mind the important moral, methodological and metaphysical criticisms of the comparative project.
Matt Barlow
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I explore elemental entanglements of waste in Kochi, Kerala. How does the presence (or absence) of earth, water, fire, or air, matter to what kinds of waste can be managed in what kinds of ways in the extreme environmental conditions of urban south India?
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I outline how attuning to the fundamental elements (earth, water, fire, air, and space/void/zero) has aided in my approaches to, and understandings of, how the materiality of waste matters in South India. I do so by reflecting on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2018-2019, where I explored the infrastructures and perceptions of waste and waste management in Kochi, the commercial and industrial capital of Kerala. Here, both liquid and solid waste is in constant motion, always being transformed by the more-than-human elements around it. Whether burnt roadside, discarded into a canal, or collected and taken to a waste management facility, waste encounters transformation due to complex combinations of human behavior and institutionalized power structures, alongside situated elemental entanglements and extreme environmental conditions. To tease out these encounters, I employ an eco-feminist reading of a popular piece of Malayali fiction, Sarah Joseph's Gift in Green, as provocation. Bringing Joseph's work into conversation with my experiences in the field and the environmental humanities more broadly, I seek to demonstrate how the intersection between environmental politics and eco-feminist literature can act as an entry point to the often intractable and contradictory elements of waste. Ultimately, I suggest that absences, or the likelihood of living with less, must continue to be cultivated and brought into more-than-human patterns of responsibility.
Zeynep Oguz (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
Taking the lithosphere as an elemental formation, this paper examines the tectonic evolution of Anatolia and the consequences of lithospheric plate movements, analyzing how geological processes are entangled with political and social worlds, imaginaries, and conflicts in Southeastern Anatolia.
Paper long abstract:
Earth's lithosphere has been in a slow and constant motion for more than 3 billion years, causing an array of geological formations and events —mountains, seismic and volcanic activitY— around its plate boundaries. In this paper, I trace the ways in which lithospheric plate movements are entangled with political and social formations in Southeastern Anatolia, which is located in an ongoing continental collision zone: The Arabian Plate has been colliding with the Eurasian Plate and, squeezing the Anatolian Plate for the past 30 million years, elevating and fracturing crust and forming mountains. Tracing the tectonic evolution of the region and geodynamic mechanisms of Anatolia, I focus on lithospheric processes that have formed these volcanic mountains and lakes in the region: subduction, where one plate moves under another and is forced to sink due to gravity into the mantle and continental collision, which occurs at convergent boundaries and involves tens of million years of faulting and folding of the crust and upper mantle. I then show how these geodynamic mechanisms and formations — Lake Van, Mount Nemrut, and Mount Ararat, have been leaving their imprint on political and social worlds, imaginaries, and conflicts in the extractive, colonial, and violent geographies of Turkey's Kurdish-populated Southeastern Anatolia. In doing so, I take "the lithospheric" as an inhuman elemental register that deeply shapes and is shaped by the uneven, violent, and emergent modes of human political and social world-making.
Georgina Drew (University of Adelaide)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores efforts to heal toxic waters. It examines measures to capture rainwater, to filter groundwater, and to transform 'dead' municipal waters into 'living water'. The aim is to highlight how elemental distrust influences the management and consumption of potentially harmful water.
Paper long abstract:
Even when supporting life, water can usher life's demise. For, beyond its elemental vitality, water is also a conveyor of harmful contamination. As a surfeit of minerals and chemicals enter the collective bloodstream, biotoxins accumulate. The recognition of this threat in a particularly dangerous and cancer-stricken hydroscape led one interlocutor to proclaim that he imagines himself, 'dying each moment' with every sip of water that he imbibes. This sentiment is compounded by the fact that, in water's case, seeing is not believing; even clear-looking water can harbor nefarious elements. To safeguard oneself against water's hidden toxins, some are adopting technologies designed to direct harvest and mechanically 'heal' the waters they consume. This paper examines several such efforts from ten months of fieldwork in South and North India conducted over the last three years. It contemplates the anthropological significance of measures to capture fresh rainwater, to filter and alkalinise groundwater, and to transform 'dead' municipal waters into 'living water'. From the use of affordable Reverse Osmosis systems to expensive 'PH' balancing devices, at stake in this discussion is the emotional-infrastructural work involved in helping people place their trust back in water's nourishing capacities. The aim is to highlight the impact of elemental distrust and ecological grief on how people understand, manage, treat, and consume the toxic waters in their midst. Technological and infrastructural innovation is a means to an end in these safeguarding practices; it enables processes through which a potentially dangerous element is made to feel restorative once more.
JM Diamanti (University of Amsterdam )
Paper short abstract:
This paper builds on recent research in the environmental and energy humanities to develop a concept of "hydrological transition" in postcolonial Greenland informed by both the elemental and the socio-historical, and offers the hydrological as a core concept of the post-oil condition.
Paper long abstract:
Melting ice fuels Greenland's postcolonial condition along two axes: on the one hand, the nation-state developed during the transition between 1979 (Home Rule) and 2009 (Self Rule) powered itself domestically and commercially by building five hydroelectric dams, powered entirely by water flowing from the ice sheet that covers eighty percent of its surface. Today, over sixty percent of the nation's energy is renewable, distributing the energy of its terminal landscape through five independent grids. On the other hand, Greenland's sovereignty coincides with global concerns for its ice. The Greenland ice sheet is expected to contribute upwards of one third of all water responsible for rising sea levels in the next century—a planetary inheritance of hydrocarbons accumulating amidst colonialism and industrialism's political ecology. Greenland's transition toward indigenous sovereignty is thus marked by a doubled sense of hydrological flow in late modernity, conditioning in turn its relationship to both energy and climate amidst the same flow of melting ice. This paper builds on recent research in the environmental and energy humanities to develop a concept of "hydrological transition" informed by both the elemental and the socio-historical, and offers the hydrological as a core concept of the post-oil condition.
Siad Darwish (Deakin University)
Paper short abstract:
Following the nitrogen cycle through space and time, this paper explores the multi-scalar violence of the Anthropocene from the molecular to the planetary.
Paper long abstract:
The Anthropocene is defined by the human appropriation of earth's biogeochemical cycles and the unequal, multi-layered distribution of harm that emanates from this appropriation. Seizure of the nitrogen cycle, which governs plant growth and underlies agriculture, has been achieved through the Haber-Bosch process, which draws atmospheric nitrogen from the air and transforms it into ammonia-based fertilizer. To achieve this near alchemical feat, the Haber-Bosch process breaks a triple chemical bond under forces so immense that they consume about 1% of world's energy. This elemental form of violence reverberates in the military entanglements of the technology and the unequal effects of nitrogen pollution, which results in freshwater eutrophication and the rapid spread of oceanic dead zones across the globe. Following the nitrogen cycle through space and time, this paper explores the multi-scalar violence of the Anthropocene from the molecular to the planetary. Based on historical research on the invention of the Haber-Bosch process and ethnographic research with communities affected by nitrogen pollution in Tunisia, this paper follows chemical relations to link seemingly disparate forms of harm in the age of humans.