More Than (Just) a Human "Earth Beneath Our Feet"
Petra's master thesis explores more-than-human processes in shaping the Blaník's "protected landscape"
The main actor in this interspecies temporal and spatial assemblages is soil. Soil as ground, full of organic biomass and mineral-rich compost. Soil as earth, to which we relate as earthlings in the ontology of the climate crisis and return "back to the Earth" as the life-giving, primary condition of our subsistence.
Soil as land bounded and defined by modernity, as a source of utility or as a complex superorganism, an unexplored universe for humans, full of "dark matter" or an entirely different cosmos for the earthworm umwelt. A land full of symbolic-material palimpsests of conflicting meanings of human and non-human life, death and decay, which, like the concept of a condensed Anthropocene represent, contains deep layers of the past that strain across our shared future.
The ethnography explores how different ways of grasping and viewing the land influence and determine its anthropocentric reality, which is utterly non-self-evident.
In what ways does modernist land-use planning, inscribed in its past through material infrastructures, determine the shape of land's superorganism, and how do these meanings determine its future? What defines the boundary of a ''conservation area''? How do farmers relate to land in their everyday lives? How are these relationships shaped by industrial chemistry, agricultural technology, the legend of the mythical knights, or the declaration of ecological protection status for the Burrowing Owl? How do more-than-human actors influence human practices of dealing with "land" in the real estate market?
To explore these intricate webs of relations that shape local symbolic-material realities, the research draws on the theoretical background of new materiality and the perspective of actor-network theory (Latour 1999), but especially on concepts of the more-than-human Anthropocene, interspecies assemblages and feral dynamics (Tsing 2015, 2017).
Publications
Hastrup, K., Hastrup, F., & Andersen, A. O. (2016). Anthropology in fluid environments. Berghahn Books.
Latour, B., & Porter, C. (1999). We have never been modern (5th ed.). Harvard University Press.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press
Tsing, A. L., Swanson, H. A., Gan, E., & Bubandt, N. (2017). Arts of living on a damaged planet. University of Minnesota Press.
