71. Knowing the underground: Spatial and temporal depth beyond extractvism
Matthaeus Rest, MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology; Alessandro Rippa, Rachel Carson Center, University of Munich
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
What does it mean and what does it take to know the underground? The extraction of underground resources has long been a central human endeavour, long before the establishment of the Carbon Liberation Front (Wark 2015). Most recently, beyond vertical geopolitics (Elden 2013) and the blatant extractivism of Carbon Democracy (Mitchell 2011), the underground has become a site of diverse investigations in the social sciences: it has physical volume as well as temporal depth and therefore it is a site of scientific knowledge production on the planetary past. In the underground the neat distinction between animate and inanimate nature becomes hard to uphold: give it enough time and resin becomes amber or DNA leaks from bones and enriches the surrounding soil. At the same time, knowing the underground is always uncertain and thus remains an epistemological horizon where conflicting onto-epistemologies clash.
We invite reflections on the underground by social scientists working at the intersection of anthropology, political geography, STS, archaeology and geology, reflecting on the nexus of spacial and temporal depth. We particularly welcome papers that address the politics of scientific knowledge production in sub-surface worlds, and how these are entangled (or fail to be) with extractive practices. Furthermore, building on recent scholarship pointing at the nexus of geological, racialised, and imperialist logics and forms of knowledge production (Yusoff 2019; Povinelli 2016; Oguz 2020), we are interested in presenations that take these critical perspectives as a starting point for discussions on the underground.
