Chaired by Emil Flatø
As John McPhee wrote in his monumental Annals of the Former World, geologists inhabit time differently, traversing geological time by “averaging about ten thousand years per step,” billions of years travelled on a successful field day. Yet earth scientists are not alone in their capacity to experience and apprehend seemingly mind-boggling temporal scales, and the way these scales concretely shape and intrude upon people’s quotidian sensibilities demonstrates that geological time is not simply an intellectual abstraction. As Leander Diener will discuss, inhabitants of certain Alpine regions applied geological knowledge about the deep time of rock formations from the late nineteenth century onwards in order to minimize the dangers of landslides and alpine mass movements. Lachlan Summers will illustrate how Mexico City’s 2017 earthquake made some of the city's residents so attuned to the ongoing signs of geological processes that they became sick with the everyday presence of geological time. And in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia, as Sophia Roosth will describe, paleontologists studying the fossils of megascopic fauna that lived during the Ediacaran period more than five hundred million years ago rely upon embodied connections to the landscape forged over decades of fieldwork. As she reports, their understanding of geological landscapes as places marked by specificity, repetition, and synchronicity run parallel to indigenous Adnyamathanha Dreamings of the same mountain range, which are similarly attuned to topographic transformations as indelible marks of ancient ancestry. Throughout, this panel will address how people make sense of the entangled scales of geological and lived time, thinking through the material, affective, embodied, and narrative dimensions of geological time occasioned by phenomena such as landslides, earthquakes, and fossilized sea-beds.
Sophia Roosth: The Zebra Finch in Alice’s Restaurant: Ediacaran Paleontology & Dreamtimes in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia
In this talk, I will describe paleontological fieldwork conducted by geobiologist Mary Droser and her lab members in the Flinders Ranges of the South Australian outback. After chronicling how long histories of settler colonialism and resource extraction (particularly mining) in South Australia have made possible paleontological discoveries in the Flinders, I will then explain how Droser and her students reconstruct ancient Ediacaran sea-beds in order to learn about the taxonomy and ecology of fossilized Ediacaran biota, megascopic fauna that lived more than five hundred million years ago prior to the Cambrian Explosion. I draw parallels between paleontological storytelling and the Dreamings of Adnyamathanha people, the indigenous community whose ancestral home is the Northern Flinders Ranges. In Yura Ngawarla, Adnyamathanha derives from Adnya, “rock,” and matha “people” – their name expresses the relationship of Adnyamathanha to the Flinders themselves, whose presence in and attachment to the mountain ranges is chronicled in their Dreamings. I am here curious about the productive entanglements of Dreaming and paleontological storytelling about the Flinders Ranges, and aim to read geological narratives as refracted through the narrative logics of the Dreaming, which accounts for the human and natural worlds as shaped by ongoing ancestral phenomena – what Tony Swain termed “rhythmed events” – that continue to shape the physical landscape and can be read indexically through signs impressed topographically in the land. I scrutinize how Adnyamathanha conceptualizations of landscapes forged via both storytelling and embodied connections to land and Country as (1) “lived in and with” rather than represented at a remove, as (2) entities in which life and land are mutually constitutive, and as (3) temporally synchronous, or “everywhen,” can be mobilized toward a more fine-grained understanding of how geologists learn to think about landscapes as places marked by specificity, repetition, and synchronicity.
Bio: Sophia Roosth is an anthropologist who writes about the contemporary life sciences. From 2020-2021, she will be a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. Roosth was the 2016 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and in 2013-2014 she was the Joy Foundation Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University and a predoctoral fellow of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She earned her PhD in 2010 in the Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Leander Diener: Deep Future Decisions: Geological Time in Alpine Settlement Planning
In geologically active areas like the Alps, the earth has been moving since time immemorial. Landslides, debris flows, and mass movements were part of everyday life. For this reason, locally specific bodies of knowledge and practices existed on how to deal with the processes in the earth. In the late nineteenth century, the interpretation of alpine hazards changed. Against the background of new models about the formation of the Alps, geologists stepped in and contributed their expertise regarding the geological hazard situation. Geology explained the deep time of the threatened settlements and villages because the mountain dwellers were confronted with exactly that: the invasion of deep time into the present. Geological knowledge about the origins of geological formations was not only in demand because it could explain current danger situations. It was at least as much in demand because it had prognostic capabilities. The specialists of deep time were at the same time experts of a deep future. Indeed, geologists used the medical vocabulary of etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy to discuss the "probable course and outcome of the mountain's disease" (Heim, 1932). This paper explores the role of geologists in the alpine space who brought deep time and deep future as applicable knowledge (symptomatology of mountains) to the planning of alpine settlements and villages. One consequence of this safety infrastructure, which was formed from the late nineteenth century onwards, was a confidence and serenity of the threatened population in the face of real dangers. This can still be felt today in villages that are under imminent threat of evacuation. And today, as in the past, deep time diagnosis contributes to risk management in the Alps.
Bio: Leander Diener is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute für the History of Science in Berlin.
Lachlan Summers: Touched by Deep Time: The Ungrounding Earth of Mexico City
In Mexico City, earthquakes make people sick. Called being tocado [touched], the illness might be considered part of the ‘culture-bound syndrome’ known as susto throughout the Americas, where acute experiences of shock – such as being trapped in a shaking building – induce chronic negative health outcomes, like anxiety, migraines, wasting, insomnia, and diabetes. Since the city’s 2017 earthquake, innumerable residents deal with the long-term health fallout of seismic exposure. Where most studies explain fright sicknesses as a maladaptive individual psychology, an idiom of social distress, or a cultural interpretation of a universal biomedical affliction, I draw on thirty months’ ethnographic research with earthquake victim advocates across Mexico City to suggest we might better understand tocado’s symptoms by following the fright itself. Because corrupt developers sign off on dangerous construction blueprints and earthly motions never cease, destruction is seldom an absolute condition for buildings in Mexico City. I examine the signs that los tocados discern in the space between relative and absolute destruction: puckering potholes, sidewalk fissures cutting into building foundations, cracks spiralling through apartments, and gaps opening between subsiding buildings. Using feminist STS studies of toxicity to bring together medical and environmental anthropologies, I follow the knowledge that fear assembles to argue that los tocados’ sense of vulnerability to ongoing geophysical processes might be understood as an embodied attunement to Mexico City’s deep time present. Instead of collapsing the human and geological scales through material semiotic frameworks, or holding them distinct with concepts like “withdrawnness” or “hyperobjects”, I show how a city riven with abyssal scalar difference sickens people with everyday deep time.
Bio: Lachlan Summers is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz.