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

构成地球基质的土壤是不断变化的有机物质、矿物质、生物、气体和液体的组合。植物、动物和人类以各种方式开采这种基质，使生命成为可能，并将其作为珍贵和有毒物质的容器。在这个地球生存的核心功能中，土壤的成分既是过去生命的档案，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，它是一部塑造我们共同未来的历史记录。“来自基质的故事”反映了土壤的历史组成，将其作为参与和叙述东非历史的媒介，并作为考虑人类世时代的观点。该项目首先在东非（坦桑尼亚、乌干达和肯尼亚）进行档案和实地调查，这将构成一个协作、互动土壤地图网站和学术专著的基础，重点介绍东非人如何依赖并在植物和动物的帮助下塑造土壤。以前关于东非土壤的学术研究几乎完全集中在殖民地发展项目和反对侵蚀的运动上，这个项目采用了多物种的方法，并以东非土壤的认知论为中心，将其视为不仅仅是农业的媒介，而且是建筑材料，是开采矿物盐的来源，是“好”和“坏”微生物生命的避风港，是污染物的汇，是家和归属感的隐喻。也是当地和全球贸易的宝贵商品。从土壤中记录该地区的历史，试图抛开现有地区历史的主流主题，这些主题讲述了政治事件以及档案的种族和殖民逻辑。通过考虑该地区的基底，该项目贴近日常生活和经常被忽视的方式，即人、动物和他们的环境相互创造和塑造历史。虽然每个案例研究都以一个特定的地方为起点，但几个主题将贯穿始终，构成该地区景观、生态、人类健康和劳动力的图景。该项目汇集了对东非土壤的各种依恋，旨在为黑人生态学做出贡献，这是一个跨学科领域，旨在研究黑人与环境之间的关系。这项工作强调了由于几个世纪的压迫和剥夺而构成许多这些环境的危害和毒性，但它也审视了尚未被探索的认识自然和与自然相处的模式。从最初的研究开始，项目转向与更广泛的研究团体合作，“与基质一起思考”。汇集了研究基质材料历史的学者，我们将考虑人类如何以不同的方式重塑和依赖于地下和陆地之间的中间层。这个跨学科的项目，本着其他关于人类世的工作的精神，比如最近的“种植园世”项目，旨在通过一个统一的调查对象来研究人类历史中庞大的一部分。虽然人类世被定义为人类影响成为塑造地球最重要力量的时代，但许多学者批评这种全盘化的概念，认为它忽略了所有社会并非都具有同等影响的事实。考虑“与基质”的人类世，并不是将一系列不同的用途和干预措施整合到地面上。这是一个利用与基材的历史接触来揭示变化的社会关系、自然概念以及与非人类动物的接触的项目。毫无疑问，这些故事将记录全球资本主义的崛起，但它也将捕捉到许多不同的本体论和认识论世界，这些世界有时会被资本主义和人类世的直白叙述所遗忘和掩盖。

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.