This paper addresses the joint becoming of landscapes, agricultural tasks and prairie rodents in the French Jura uplands, where the development of hay monoculture triggered outbreaks of water voles that reduce pastures to dust. I explore links between processual landscape anthropology and contemporary scholarship on more‐than‐human entanglements in order to follow how ecological disruptions called for the development of new arts of noticing towards multispecies life. I first describe the relationships between Jura farmers, voles, fields and agricultural modernisation programmes, and suggest that vole outbreaks bring these together around shared tasks. I then consider how disputes over how to control voles led to changes in farmers’ ways of caring for their cows and tending the fields. I argue that these underlined changes in their ways of understanding and responding to the rhythms of the landscape’s more‐than‐human activities. Finally, I draw on the example of conflicts between farmers over whether cows or pastures should be more central to their work. I make the case that to be attentive to fields as a landscape in the Jura is ultimately to define the (in)appropriateness of certain actions and tasks. It becomes constitutive of what ‘good farming’ should be, and precipitates new identities.
This paper studies the capture of organisms and materials in soil construction – a branch of ecological engineering dedicated to making soil in order to compensate for soil degradation. This approach takes all organisms to be ‘ecosystem engineers’, and often refers to earthworms as ‘collaborators’ in making soil. I examine the claim that such a convocation of worms amounts to a redistribution of agency and the underlying assumption that form-taking is the shaping of raw matter according to pre-existing forms. Drawing on processual anthropology, I question the distinction between living and material components of soils, and between growing and making. I elaborate on soil scientists’ description of soil growth as pedogenesis in order to propose a view in which soil materials, along with organisms, participate in soil’s transformative and generative fluxes. I envisage the process as a concrescence, an experimentation that brings humans, worms, and soil materials together in new ways.
This paper examines how artistic collaborations between anthropologists and natural scientists can help address challenges that themes relating to the Anthropocene and more than human realities pose to academic disciplines. It draws on a one-year collaboration among two anthropologists, two artists, a soil ecologist, and a geographer working toward an exhibition on the heavily anthropogenic soils of cities. The preparation of speculative Soil Fictions-narrative installations shown in the exhibition-allowed experimenting with new modes of inquiry that proved complementary to more traditional ethnographic methods. The authors argue in favor of wider recognition of such experiments within anthropology.
In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often – barring those that already figure as the principal characters of individual contributions – and to distribute among ourselves the task of writing a sort of mini-biography for each. The resulting lexicon with 19 entries, ranging from ‘cloud’ and ‘concrete’ to ‘wave’ and ‘wood’, serves as a conclusion to the collection as a whole.
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