Conférence - David HENIG - ELEMENTAL RECKONINGS: ALTERLIVES OF HUMAN-SOIL RELATIONS IN WAR-DISTURBED ENVIRONMENTS

TITRE:

ELEMENTAL RECKONINGS: ALTERLIVES OF HUMAN-SOIL RELATIONS IN WAR-DISTURBED ENVIRONMENTS

What forms of elemental relations, intimacies, and attunements emerge in the environments disturbed by war? Focused on one natural element in particular - explosive soil, this talk develops the notion of elemental reckoning as a heuristics, which ethnographically attends to the forms of alterlife transformed by war, that is, life already altered by and entangled in violent histories of explosive and toxic exposures and contaminations of soil. Elemental reckoning, I suggest, can then help us analytically to render two processes simultaneously. First, it documents how war alters human-elements relations. Second, it tracks how these alterlives generate various worlding responses. Drawing on my long-term fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this talk thinks with soil and human-soil relationality to ethnographically elucidate the active modes of toxic and explosive worlding that emerge from people’s encounters, interactions, and negotiations with the soil-wastes of war entanglements, and landmines in particular. It proceeds in three overlapping ‘elemental moves’ of reckoning. At every move, in composing the story of elemental reckonings, I interweave it with ethnographic elements, a series of contingent encounters and entanglements among (mainly) humans, soil, and explosive ordnance. The first move traces how wars instigate elemental upheavals, that is, disturbance and rearrangement of human-soil relations in consequential ways. This, in turn, fosters the emergence of new forms of elemental attunements with soil. And finally, I consider how these alterlives of war cannot be simply reduced to the incapacitated forms of live but instead engender various creative ways of reclaiming and repairing the spaces stolen by war, that is, the ways of doing elemental infrapolitics.