Stories from the Substrate: A 20th Century History of East Africa from the Soil

来自底层的故事：从土壤看东非的20世纪历史

• 批准号: AH/W007568/1
• 负责人: Emily Brownell
• 金额: $ 21万
• 依托单位: University of Edinburgh
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FW007568%2F1
• 关键词: Stories; Substrate; 20th; Century; History

The soil that makes up the earth's substrate is an ever-changing assemblage of organic matter, minerals, organisms, gases, and liquids. Plants, animals, and humans in a host of ways mine this substrate to make life possible and use it as a container for things both precious and toxic. In this central function of earthly survival, soil's composition is both an archive of past life as well as the planet's largest carbon sink, capturing within it emissions from centuries ago. It is, in its very essence, a historical record that shapes our collective future. "Stories from the Substrate" reflects on the historical composition of soil by using it as a medium for engaging with and narrating East African history and as a point of view for considering the epoch of the Anthropocene. This project begins with both archival and fieldwork in East Africa (Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya) that will form the basis of a collaborative, interactive soil map website and scholarly monograph that highlights how East Africans have relied on and shaped soil with the help of plants and animals. Previous scholarship on soil in East Africa has focused almost exclusively on colonial development projects and campaigns against erosion, this project takes a multispecies approach and centres East African epistemologies of soil to view it as not just a medium of agriculture, but as a building material, a source for mining mineral salts, the haven of "good" and "bad" microbial life, a sink for pollutants, a metaphor of home and belonging, and a valuable commodity of both local and global trade. Chronicling a history of the region from the soil seeks to set aside the prevailing themes of extant regional histories that narrate from political events and the ethnic and colonial logics of the archive. By considering the region through its substrate, this project hews close to the everyday and the often unseen or overlooked ways that people, animals, and their environments make one another and shape history. While each case study takes a particular place as its starting point, several themes will run throughout, assembling a picture of landscape, ecology, human health and labor in the region. In bringing together a variety of attachments to the soil in East Africa, this project aims to contribute to Black Ecologies, an interdisciplinary field seeking to examine the relationship between Black people and their environments. This work highlights the harm and toxicity that comprise many of these environments due to centuries of oppression and dispossession, but it also examines modes of knowing and being with nature that have gone under-explored. From this initial research, the project then shifts to collaborate with a wider research community to "Think with the Substrate". Bringing together scholars who work on histories of substrate materials, we will consider how humans have variably remade and relied on this middle layer between the subterranean and terrestrial. This inter-disciplinary project, in the spirit of other work on the Anthropocene such as the recent Plantationocene project, aims to engage with an unwieldy chunk of human history through a unifying object of inquiry. While the Anthropocene has been defined as the epoch when human impact has been the most consequential force shaping the earth, many scholars have critiqued the totalizing concept for eliding the fact that all societies have not had equal impact. To think about the Anthropocene "with the substrate" is not to assemble a list of different uses and interventions into the ground. It is a project of using historical engagements with substrate matter to reveal variable social relations, conceptions of nature, and engagements with nonhuman animals. These stories will no doubt chronicle the rise of global capitalism, but it will also capture the many alternative ontological and epistemological worlds that are sometimes forgotten and overshadowed in blunt narratives of capitalism and the Anthropocene.

构成地球基质的土壤是有机质、矿物质、有机体、气体和液体不断变化的集合体。植物、动物和人类以各种方式挖掘这种底物，使生命成为可能，并将其用作存放珍贵和有毒物品的容器。在地球生存的这一中心功能中，土壤的组成既是过去生活的档案，也是地球上最大的碳汇，它捕获了几个世纪前的排放。从本质上讲，它是塑造我们共同未来的历史记录。《来自底物的故事》反映了土壤的历史构成，将其作为接触和叙述东非历史的媒介，并作为考虑人类世时代的观点。该项目从东非(坦桑尼亚、乌干达和肯尼亚)的档案和实地工作开始，将形成一个合作、互动的土壤地图网站和学术专著的基础，突出东非人如何依靠植物和动物塑造土壤。以前关于东非土壤的学术研究几乎完全集中在殖民发展项目和防治侵蚀运动上，该项目采取多物种办法，以东非土壤认识论为中心，不仅将土壤视为农业媒介，而且将其视为建筑材料、开采矿物盐的来源、“好的”和“坏的”微生物生命的庇护所、污染物的水槽、家园和归属感的比喻，以及当地和全球贸易的贵重商品。从土地上记录该地区的历史试图搁置现存地区历史的主流主题，这些主题从政治事件以及档案中的种族和殖民逻辑进行叙述。通过考虑该地区的底物，这个项目接近日常生活，以及人们、动物和他们的环境相互创造和塑造历史的方式，这些方式往往看不见或被忽视。虽然每个案例研究都以特定的地点为起点，但几个主题将贯穿始终，汇集该地区的景观、生态、人类健康和劳动的图景。通过将东非土壤的各种依恋结合在一起，该项目旨在为黑人生态做出贡献，这是一个寻求研究黑人与其环境之间关系的跨学科领域。这项工作突出了由于几个世纪的压迫和剥夺而构成的许多这些环境的危害和毒性，但它也审查了人们认识自然和与自然相处的模式，这些模式被忽视了。从最初的研究，该项目随后转向与更广泛的研究社区合作，以“与底物一起思考”。我们将把从事衬底材料历史研究的学者聚集在一起，考虑人类是如何以不同的方式重塑和依赖地下和地面之间的这一中间层的。这一跨学科项目本着人类世其他工作的精神，如最近的植物新世项目，旨在通过一个统一的调查对象来研究人类历史中的一大块笨拙的东西。虽然人类世被定义为人类影响一直是塑造地球的最重要力量的时代，但许多学者批评这种总体性的概念，因为它回避了所有社会都没有产生同等影响的事实。想一想人类世“有底物”并不是要把不同的用途和对地面的干预汇集在一起。这是一个利用历史与底层物质的接触来揭示不同的社会关系、自然概念以及与非人类动物的接触的项目。这些故事无疑将记录全球资本主义的崛起，但它也将捕捉到许多另类的本体论和认识论世界，这些世界有时被资本主义和人类世的直率叙述所遗忘和掩盖。