In Europe and its settler colonies, the geological and the human have long been defined in relation to each other, as argued by various scholars, but often not in conscious or recognized ways. Important recent scholarship has shown the extent to which these two realms need to be considered together.1 Human and rock have often depended on the nonrecognition of these realms as thinkable at the same time or in the same scale. From this, indeed, comes the rhetorical—and by extension the political—weight of the Anthropocene as a construct. The conceptual separations of the human and the geological, as well as their moments of conjunction or juxtaposition, provoke considerations of otherness and difference.
In my own discipline of sociocultural anthropology, concerns around the geological and the inorganic have been bubbling up for a few years now. In the introduction to a 2020 edition of the journal Cultural Anthropology’s “Theorizing the Contemporary” Editors’ Forum on “geological anthropology,” Zeynep Oguz wrote that “grasping our planetary predicament might only be possible by reconsidering Geos and Anthropos together, and thus rethinking what the geological and the human entail simultaneously.”2 In my own contribution to that forum, I considered Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s article “Anthropology and the Savage Slot” and its relational framework of order/utopia/savage as a long-standing construct of European, Christian, and Western knowledge.3 Adding “the inorganic slot” to that triad, I argued, would keep the relational focus while attending to inorganic worlds and the divisions of knowledge—the earth sciences—charged with keeping them. I framed this as a contribution to conversations around “white geology” and the practices of taxonomy and extractivism it underwrites.4
Here, though, I’d like to draw attention to the subtitle of Trouillot’s essay, “The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” Trouillot framed his piece in this way to challenge US postmodern challenges to the authority of ethnographic texts by placing them in a much broader and chronologically longer framework, to address humans imagined as other by the West (either in proto-anthropological accounts of the savage or in the utopian genres that emerged, he argued, alongside these). Thirty years after that article, critiques of anthropology’s othering practices are well established (though still, it must be said, relevant). Yet the inorganic and the geological, the rocky and the dusty, are yet more other, and expanding an attention to the politics and poetics of otherness to the inorganic allows us to see questions of the human in a broader, more-than-human world, not to mention one profoundly shaping by extractive capitalism and its forays into the earth.
That forum I just described centered on anthropological approaches, while the articles here frame the concern more broadly and in a slightly different direction, toward the environmental humanities. From this perspective, otherness and difference still pertain as conceptual resting places, perhaps with less of the disciplinary weight of anthropology’s role of curating the “savage slot.” Considering otherness and difference from this vantage point might then help us (as Trouillot argued) situate that role in a broader project of the West, put into practice by the operation of the disciplines. In what follows I point to a few ways in which otherness and difference (and, of course, sameness) can be mobilized with respect to the geological.
Knowing the Unknowable. While the inorganic world encompasses a realm of the other that cannot ever be fully known by humans, this unknowableness exists in a dialectical relationship with tools and modes of accounting and registration that attempt to capture and contain it, without ever completely succeeding. In the context of scientific practice linked to extractivism, these take the form of mining, engineering, and the taxonomic sciences that described, engridded, and collected the world of rocks and minerals (along with plants and people).
In 1890, Ponciano Aguilar, a mining engineer, mineralogist, and mineral collector was working as the superintendent of the San Carlos silver mine in the central Mexican mining city of Guanajuato. William Niven, a field collector for the Philadelphia-based mineral dealer George L. English, came to Guanajuato and met Aguilar, who provided him with a few specimens.5 Upon returning to the United States, Niven sent the samples for analysis, which showed that in addition to silver and selenium, the specimens contained sulfur, distinguishing them from both acanthite (Ag2S) and naumannite (Ag2Se). On account of this, Genth identified it as “a new species, which has been named Aguilarite in honor of its discoverer.”6 Aguilarite emerged as a distinct and knowable entity—not a terribly important one, it’s true, but one that set into motion new actions to understand it, define its distinctiveness, and collect samples of it. As a new entrant into a category of “Mexican minerals,” it was sought out by Mexican, US, and Canadian mining engineers, scientists, and collectors. In these ways, it resembled other, more famous, more destructive, or more lucrative, efforts to bring the inorganic world into the lamplight of knowability.
Analogy. Relations between the human and the geological frequently take the form of analogy, in which otherwise unlike things are compared in terms of specific points of likeness. This is a particular strategy of holding otherness and sameness in dynamic tension, and thus a technology for thinking through relations between these orthogonal realms. Clark and Whittle (this issue) use the analogy between climatic approaches to human evolution and studies of how humans raised their children to unsettle assumptions of modern Western knowledge formations from within. Zeynep Oguz’s article (also in this issue) shows how resource extraction and war are kept separate by some and analogized by others, culminating in an enduring shale rock made of long-compressed organic matter.
The concept of “orebody,” common in geology, relies on analogy: “Orebody: A continuous, well-defined mass of material of sufficient ore content to make extraction economically feasible.”7
In the drawing in figure 1, the thickened portions of each vein in the Guanajuato mining district represent an orebody, marked with the names of the mines that have been constructed to exploit them and the city of Guanajuato and its satellite towns that have grown around these. Their lumpy or shapely forms mark them as bodies, and their generativity of wealth in the form of silver and gold. Orebodies and the mines that are constructed to exploit them also have life spans, after which they are considered “dead” or more recently, and with ecopolitical intent, as “zombie mines.” Yet the tense and excessive relation (Oguz and Whitington, this issue) between the human and the geological mean that such analogies are often awkwardly fitting and liable to decompose.
Fractals, temporal and spatial. Often the otherness of the geological appears in the matter of scale, whether temporal or spatial. Sometimes, then, attempts to capture—or at least to gesture toward—these tremendous leaps of time and space take form as fractal arguments or representations, a kind of analogy performed at different scales. The geopoetic approach described by Bobbette (this issue) as connecting scales of time and space gets at this way of approaching otherness.
On the “Flowers of the Mineral Kingdom” Facebook group and on Pinterest, collectors and enthusiasts post photos of minerals that resemble flowers or are flowerlike in their delicacy and beauty. Specific mineral species that look like flowers are also called by names like “desert rose” or “azurite blossom.” A lily blooms in a single year, and calcite crystals over millions of years, but comparing them—or, indeed, calling one by the name of the other—is not uncommon among these mineral collectors.
The formation of minerals through geological processes, such as the growth of gypsum crystals over time that look like roses grown in a single season, draws on the formal similarity of these processes, but at a vastly different timescale. In making these distinctions and connections, people are not denying the radical difference between minerals, plants, and animals; rather, they are underscoring it. This entails a willed displacement of perspective, which is opened up, at least momentarily, by the impression of untold ages of geological time within which what appear in our more limited time frame to be static forms are constantly heaving, bending, growing, decaying, building up, and melting away.
Praxis. Articles in this issue consider these various technologies of relating the realms of rock and human. They show how people grapple with, seek to bridge or control, to historicize, or to produce, the shock of radical difference between them, and often several of these actions at once. The excess in these rock-human relations contributes to a pluralization of the human8 no longer capable of being captured within a regimented protocol of the disciplines of knowledge (actually, this wasn’t ever achievable), but oozing out or cracking open into an expanded range of planetary possibilities.
Notes
Fagan, “On the Dangers of an Anthropocene Epoch”; Povinelli, Geontologies; Raffles, “Twenty-Five Years Is a Long Time”; Yusoff, Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.
Jobson, “Dead Labor”; Yusoff, Billion Black Anthropocenes or None; Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.”
