Soil Within Us: An Autopedology of Migrant Family History and Mourning through the Medium of Soil

Abstract

Drawing on personal experiences, ethnographic observations, novels, videos on social networking sites, a poem, and a family diary, this essay explores the mourning of deaths in one’s family history and in the migrant community against the backdrop of political events, including the Russia-Ukraine war, and geological occurrences. Paying attention to how soil manifests itself in these events, the author investigates the potential of soil to serve as a medium for experiencing and coming to terms with the world. The study proposes a genre of autopedology in which the ethnographer writes about events through soil and undergoes the process of formation together with the soil. The essay travels a road of six signposts, from the embodied to the ontological, then to the destructive, to the decomposing, to the consumable and consuming, and finally to the mourning soil. It is shown that the soil within us offers the means to express and stand up against unjust deaths. The study is complemented by photography as a means of visualisation of the process of mourning with soil.