(Un)Earthing violence: Ecologies of remembering, forgetting and reckoning

ABSTRACT

This article and the special issue it introduces contribute to existing debates on forgetting, remembering, and reckoning with past violence by bringing them up to date with violence's materially and spatially expansive workings that recent scholarship on sovereignty and ecology has highlighted. Thinking with scholars who have considered organized violence as the maker of ‘weathers', ‘atmospheres' and ‘ecologies', we engage critically with how the Earth in all its relationally constituted expansiveness has become central to remembering, forgetting and reckoning with violent histories. We conceptualize practices that evidence this centrality as ‘(un)earthing'. The concept has both empirical and methodological implications. It obliges us to reconsider longstanding methodological tendencies to privilege either the earthly (i.e., the secular, the positivist and the rational) or the unearthly (i.e., the spiritual, the supernatural and the irrational) over the other. We reconsider these tendencies critically by using the concept of (un)earthing to interweave empirical analyses of magic, haunting and ufology with those of farming, exhumation and burial. The special issue spans various contemporary contexts where practices of ‘(un)earthing’ address – whether directly or indirectly – the legacy of political (especially colonial and racial) violence, ranging from the United States, Colombia and Chile to South Africa, Turkey and Austria.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• violence
• ecology
• coloniality
• race
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

This special issue originated in a double panel that the co-editors organized as part of the Royal Anthropological Institute's 2020 conference themed "Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future." We thank all those involved in the organization of this conference and the audiences who attended our panels and contributed with questions and comments. We also express our sincere gratitude to Aykut Öztürk, Marlene Schäfers, and David Henig for their invaluable critical input into the special issue as a whole. Finally, we thank all the authors for remaining committed to this collective endeavour over the past three years and for contributing so generously to it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).