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illustration depicting layers of soil with roots and human artifacts interpersed and people working the surface

Essays

Introduction

Emily Brownell

Two summers ago I was in Nakuru, Kenya to conduct research for a project on soil when I met Helen. She offered to take me to her herbalist, whose shop occupied the sidewalk of a busy street corner in the centre of town. It was a place where casual, yet intimate, consultations unfolded on a small wooden bench. Helen had first sought out the woman's help trying to conceive and then continued to see her for various ailments and aspirations. We stood in line for my own brief consultation on the well-worn bench. Mostly, I was interested in her bags of clay for sale called munyo (sometimes also called udongo, or odowa). Helen was eager to assure me that she herself did not eat clay or soil. At least, not anymore. She understood that women ate it for calcium and iron and to calm their stomachs during pregnancy, but Helen worried that the toxins in the clay often had exacerbating effects rather than salutary ones. The woman in front of me in line inhabited the space with the ease of a regular client. She was helping herself to pinches of clay as she chatted about her health problems. Putting the bag back on the counter as she walked away, she turned to me with a wry smile and said if she took the bag home, it would be gone in a day or two. I broke off a crumbling chunk; the taste was minerally, chalky and slightly salty. When it was my turn, I asked the herbalist where the clay came from and she said it came from no particular place but was often gathered along busy roadsides known for their clay deposits. Its origins didn't seem to hold much significance to her. A few days later, my research assistant, whom I had also recruited into my curiosity about munyo, told me it came from a cemetery in the southern part of the city when soil was dug for interring new bodies. Later that day, as I sat down with a young researcher for a conversation on other topics, he laughed when I asked him about munyo too. He recalled his mother eating it frequently. 'There's a joke I've heard lately', he said, 'that Kenyans are so poor now, women cannot even afford to eat soil anymore!'

As I travelled around Kenya and later Uganda I noticed bags of clay for sale in most markets. It was usually sold by women alongside a range of herbs. Some described the habit as starting in childhood and for others it was during pregnancy. It was often discussed as an addiction: a desire that would simply arrive at some point and was hard to vanquish. I sensed that craving munyo might reveal someone to be 'country' folk, despite the habit's overwhelming ubiquity. My friend in Kampala (where it is called bumba) explained that it was social for her: a pleasurable habit amongst friends. But when she had feared someone might suspect she was pregnant if they caught her eating soil, she worked hard to curb her appetite. When we went to a busy market so I could buy some, she promptly broke off a piece, popping it in her mouth gleefully. While scholars often discuss eating soil as a sign of poor health or a disordered compulsion (geophagy or pica), this language leaves so much out of the picture.1 Munyo/Bumba was a source of connection to a particular place and an abiding pleasure. Some women described how they preferred the taste of the soil from their home, priding themselves on their ability to distinguish its particular flavor. Young children can even be in the habit of peeling dried mud off the side of their huts, literally ingesting their home.2

There is nothing unique about East Africans for eating clay or soil; it happens on every continent. And yet the particularities of its practice are certainly locally determined and debated. The jokes are local, too. While I was working on other things that summer in East Africa, munyo became my preoccupation. My larger project was framed as an examination of how soil offers a starting point and a point of view from which to write the region's history. The practice of eating clay captured something essential about what makes soil a compelling material for considering the intersections of our social and ecological worlds. Soil is always multiple and in excess of its role in planetary ecosystems. It is both this material excess (the fact that it is a truly heterodox substance) and its affective excess (many different things are invoked when soil is invoked), that make it a rich subject. In this instance, munyo was many things at once: a compulsion, a gendered pleasure, a nutritional supplement and a source of potential harm. It was also a link to home and to the dead, a marker of class, a rite of passage, a social relation. I do not think my brief conversations even really scratched the surface, to choose a relevant aphorism. Munyo demonstrated so explicitly that we humans are of the soil – our fates bound to its ability to sustain and harm – always hungering for the connections it fosters. And, likewise, soil is in our thrall, vulnerable to our care and transgressions. At some point for us all, the distinction will attenuate: the eater becomes the eaten and we will become soil.

This edited volume advocates for soil to become a germane topic for the humanities and social sciences. Soil is a medium in the most elemental sense of the word – both container and conduit – for telling stories about human life. This is not our revelation alone; a recent profusion of thinking about soil beyond the domain of the physical sciences is reflected within the syllabus that makes up Part I of this book. For a substance that sustains much of life on earth, this attention should be unsurprising.3 And yet, despite a rich his- tory of art and writing that makes reference to it, soil as an object of study has mostly remained the purview of biologists, chemists, geologists, engineers and agronomists.4 The recent renaissance in soil studies that has pushed beyond these disciplines reflects a growing effort within the humanities and social sciences to develop new frameworks and terms of art for grappling with the existential stakes of how humans and nature shape one another (and to dispense with such unhelpful binaries in the first place).5

When soil enters into these new research registers, what has been understood as biological processes and functions is interrogated in new ways. What was erosion or soil exhaustion comes into focus as the demands of capitalist agriculture systems, the byproduct of racial inequality, and the consequences of unremitting growth.6 What might have been reported in anxious calculations of soil fertility might now be considered in terms of regimes of care and risks of exposure.7 To point out this new language is not to suggest that all scientists have entirely elided the social and political life of soil.8 I am oversimplifying to make a point: when new disciplines move into ongoing conversations, they provoke moments when the subject at hand can be seen anew. And, in return, those who might have written off the biological for the cultural are forced to confront the liveliness and materiality of the soil itself. Soil is not an inert material to be acted upon. Its capacity to have a life and sustain life far beyond that which we humans prescribe for it is increasingly apparent. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa writes, soil has shifted in both scientific and social registers from being a 'receptacle for crops' to being a 'living community' that humans may meddle in by augmenting, depleting and remaking, but do not entirely govern – let alone entirely understand.9

The broad, open-ended question that anchors this book is: if soil is a medium for telling important stories, what do we learn about our current historical moment when we start from the ground up? There is rich metaphorical potential here, but I also mean this literally and practically. In the essays that comprise Part 2 of this book, each author explores a moment where people have moved, modified, depleted, measured or remade soil for a particular purpose. These interventions always incur both intended and unintended consequences: what social, political or economic conditions are reflected or created in their wake?

To approach these basic questions, we conceptualise this thin layer of earth that exists between our atmosphere and the subterranean world as most fundamentally a container for life. The agronomist Derek Lynch likens soil to a library, functioning as a repository of memory for landscapes.10 While this might evoke an intangible relationship between soil and place, the connection is also material. Through the slow accretions of our everyday interventions into the ground, soil contains a chronicle of past lives, both recent and ancient – some historic, some biological, some geological. Soil holds the remainders of human attempts at improving its yields. Soil contains the refuse we bury when we no longer want to account for it – these disquieting reminders of the costs of production. But, soil also houses the incidental material past of human lives that shift between cultural and biological registers and sometimes back.11 Methodologically, this requires thinking capaciously about what comprises soil and for whom it holds such things. Considering soil as a container for life suggests searching out its many different roles rather than seeing it as just an object of agronomy or science alone. Looking at what comprises it – minerals, parasites, organic matter – and what gets put in or taken out offers both insights into the past and a point of entry for considering the biological constraints that shape our collective future.

With this conceptualisation, there is still a risk of seeing soil too simplistically as a 'receptacle' for things. But it is worth reconsidering what it means to hold things and serve as a medium. I am following here the work of feminist STS scholars, like Zo Sofia who conceptualises containers as technologies that have been left out of a history of science due to their associations of being inert, feminine, and passive in a history that tends to focus on phallo-centric tools. 'Unlike the tool', she writes, 'which needs manipulation to perform its function, the container can perform its holding function automatically: a jar can simply sit there, full, on the shelf and be working to capacity.' Containers are not charismatic. They have not produced much historical inquiry, but that is more revealing of the viewer than the object. Containers are also not necessarily inert. The humble pot on the stove imparts iron into the food it cooks. The clay jug infuses milk with its earthy tang. Thinking about containers also allows us to move from the mundane vessel on the kitchen counter to human bodies to the biggest container of them all … the environment – the ever feminised 'mother earth'. In addition to being feminised, containers often accompany women's work. Sofia draws in part on Lewis Mumford, who also saw containers as neglected by scholars. He pointed out that containers are the tools of cooking, milking, dyeing, tanning, brewing and gardening. These occupations are all bound up with 'the vital processes of fertilization, growth, and decay, or the life arresting processes of sterilization and preservation', as is soil. This further resonates with the fact that, in many cultures, soil is the domain of feminised work. A container is also not impervious. Soil is almost unbearably vulnerable to transformation and infiltration – being remade constantly from above and below. But, such vulnerability is also a reminder that 'contamination' is essential for life.12 Or, as Tim Ingold writes, bodies exist only because they are porous and provisional – leakage and containment cannot be pulled apart.13

If soil is a container, what does it hold, what passes through it, and what is taken out of it? An older model within Western scientific discourses has treated soil as predominantly a medium that sustains and delimits biological life.14 Such conceptions of soil mean it also serves as a reservoir for collective anxiety about civilisational limits and collapse. The history of nineteenth and twentieth century agronomy in large part was an ongoing experiment in measuring the capacities of soil to accommodate increasing demands of crop production and the efforts to stretch this capacity through the emergence of an immense industry of soil inputs (fertilisers and pesticides). Alongside such efforts, soil became a litmus test of racial and civilisational superiority.15 Its relative health or its ailing state was wielded as a critique of both capitalism and state socialism's capricious theft of soil's fertility with little regard for its need for renewal. To put it bluntly: whatever your political persuasion, there was a morality tale to tell about states and soil fertility.

More recent research has shed light on soil's life (and role in planetary health) far beyond industrial agriculture.16 Non-western epistemologies of soil have, all along, also rendered it visible in these different registers.17 Our interests here, particularly evident in our syllabus, are to chart this new work on soil. However, we also seek to bring into the conversation an array of ways that soil anchors life (and death) outside its biologically productive capacity to sustain it. In part, we do this by considering substances that might sit on the edges of what soil is definitionally. Some essays in Part 2 describe the engagements around something that is immediately understood to be soil. To be categorised as such, soil must hold not just inert material, but must also contain soil organic matter – a riotous and heterogenous mixture of organisms that give soil its metabolic life. As the soil scientist Johannes Lehman writes in the first essay in our collection, what constitutes soil organic matter (referred to often as 'humus') and how it functions within soil has itself been the subject of centuries of debate.

Other essays, however, push the limits of that definition. For example, Dotan Halevy's essay on the Gaza Strip focuses on sand and the politically volatile question of when sand becomes soil. Paul Kurek's essay looks at glacial till, a substance comprised of sand, silt and clay with very little organic material. In Nazi Germany, when the mutually reinforcing purity of 'blood and soil' was imagined to hold the key to a grand Teutonic future (and past), Kurek uses a chunk of glacial till to interrogate whether the fundamental concreteness of 'place' was even a steady state or fundamentally the product of interminable movement. Steven Stoll's essay is about 'overburden' – rock and soil that barreled downward into Appalachian hollows in the 1970s as a remainder from mountaintop removal mining. Euphemistically called 'valley fill' by the industries that produce it, the detritus literally chokes out life rather than fostering it. Jayson Porter traces arsenic through its life as a toxic remainder from mining to a pesticide for cotton production – extracted out of, and entering back into, soil while enacting cycles of bodily harm to workers. In other words, as a collection of essays, we are interested in soil's constituent parts and its other uses, as well as how the earth's substrate might come in and out of view as soil. Furthermore, the parameters of soil's scientific definitions do not always align with the phenomenology of soil, which many people might interchangeably identify as dirt or dust.

Having briefly defined soil, what then do we mean by 'grasping'? This word came out of our workshop in the summer of 2024 at Max Planck History of Science in Berlin where we collectively created the syllabus that comprises Part I.18 To grasp something has at least three meanings and together they capture a range of impulses and relationships that we aim to highlight between people and soil.

First, to grasp something means to take hold of it firmly with your hands. At the most fundamental level, this is what children do when they first explore soil – it is something to grab, taste and manipulate. People who routinely use soil also grasp soil in this way to assess its particular qualities – whether they are a potter, a scientist or a gardener.19 Holding it in their hands, squeezing it, smelling it and seeing if it crumbles or holds the shape of a closed fist is an appraisal of the material at hand. Soil's malleability might be both its most basic characteristic and its most sacred one. On every continent, there are communities, both in the past and present, who narrate their earthly origins as a moment when a god formed human and animal life out of clay.20

Secondly, to grasp means to understand something that has thus far proved a challenge to apprehend. Overcoming this struggle then leads to a practiced mastery. Alternately, if someone has 'lost' their grasp on something, it suggests a cognitive slippage of sorts. That, despite one's best efforts, something has become incomprehensible and elusive: a lost grasp on reality. To speak of grasping soil in this register is to consider centuries of knowledge production about soil that has sought to understand its constituent parts. While in a contemporary register this is called soil science or agronomy, soil's epistemic roots go far beyond the boundaries we might draw around science today. Such genealogies also leave out the knowledge of the practitioner such as the farmer or the builder who have cultivated their own intimate grasp on soil. This reminds me of the opening pages of The Known World by Edward P. Jones where Moses, an enslaved man in the America South, leaves the field after a long day of work:

Moses closed his eyes and bent down and took a pinch of the soil and ate it with no more thought than if it were a spot of cornbread. He worked the dirt around in his mouth and swallowed, leaning his head back and opening his eyes in time to see the strip of sun fade to dark blue and then to nothing …. This was July, and July dirt tasted even more like sweetened metal than the dirt of June or May. Something in the growing crops unleashed a metallic life that only began to dissipate in mid-August, and by harvest time that life would be gone altogether, replaced by a sour moldiness he associated with the coming of fall and winter, the end of a relationship he had begun with the first taste of dirt back in March, before the first hard spring rain.21

Moses here is both physically and mentally grasping soil, able to catalogue its qualities from his long history of coaxing life from it, season after season.

A third definition of grasping means that something has come physically under your control. To grasp soil in this way is to claim territory and in doing so, to alienate land (and soil) from others – whether through legal regimes or extralegal violence. This use of the term might invoke an image of an explorer or an exhausted army picking up a handful of earth as a sign of conquest; soil is the 'part' that stands in for the whole in these images. In the Western tradition, the metonymic role of soil here barely needs to be explained; the connection is a familiar symbol. Colonial legacies of claiming territory, not incidentally, are often accompanied by a narrative of settlers being better custodians of the soil. In these instances, claiming territory is justified precisely because settlers have a better 'grasp' on soil science. Dispossession is justified in terms of who can maximise the productivity of the soil within very narrow ecological horizons. Again, we can see how these various modes of grasping soil can be used to corroborate one another. If grasping in this third definition points to the transformation of human and soil relations through regimes of private property that emerged through enclosure and imperialism, an alternative vision exists through what Sarah Lincoln has called 'fugitive gardening'. Lincoln defines fugitive gardening as 'as a form of 'poaching' or 'resignifying', a 'radical appropriation of hegemonic spaces and practices that both deconstructs the logics of mastery and hygienic possessiveness that underpin colonial culture, and articulates what we might call a fugitive ecology: a dispossession of self in relation to the environment, a refusal to conceive of land, soil, or planet in terms of property'.22 While Lincoln's work focuses on the fugitive practices of Black gardeners in apartheid South Africa, the term also evokes the earlier work of Sylvia Wynter in the 1970s who wrote about the garden plots cultivated by enslaved women in the Caribbean that existed outside of the logics of plantation accumulation and exploitation.23 This tradition of resistance to property regimes argues that one cannot make such claims to soil without severing a web of other relationships with humans, nonhumans and the soil.

We do not intend anything overly programmatic by offering these three definitions of 'grasping' soil. However, we do hope you consider the multiple valences of the verb as a helpful heuristic for considering how touching soil, knowing soil, and possessing soil can be consolidating projects of control and ownership or countervailing projects and contested ways of engaging with it.

Structure of the book

Part I: The Syllabus

The first part of this book is a collectively authored syllabus divided into four parts: Soil as Substrate; Soil as Archive; Soil as Health; Soil as Belonging. The syllabus offers a starting point for anyone who might want to learn or teach a course on soil's role as a container for human history. In addition to existing here in book form, the syllabus also lives online where it will continue to be updated, offering links to the material where possible. Each section of the syllabus offers activities and assignments in addition to readings, podcasts and documentaries. The syllabus offers a place to see what is currently happening in this new scholarly turn to the substrate while also gathering from a variety of sources and stories that might be missed in this literature.

Putting together a collective syllabus invites questions about what such a document does. As the first document in a course, a syllabus serves as a roadmap and contract for communal learning. And yet it also captures the moment before the class unfolds in real time, where a teacher might fleetingly and foolishly still feel they have control over the endeavour of learning. For busy scholars, syllabi represent an aspirational list of books they haven't had time to read; a slice of their research they are still trying to get a handle on; a list of questions they hope students take up seriously. Ideally, a syllabus is a living document and not a settled appraisal of a topic or field. The syllabus is an ethical endeavour too; building a syllabus represents an opportunity to reconsider who one reads and cites and thus how one fundamentally thinks.

When the syllabus is handed out, it becomes an invitation to have a shared conversation in a fragmented world. They are inevitably public documents – and thus open to contestation and polemicisation. In their ongoing lives as artefacts as much as teaching tools, they can be conscripted for various purposes, held up by politicians in theatrical contests over what is frivolous or essential knowledge. In more recent years, the syllabus has also emerged as a tool for channelling collective outrage and grief into an exercise in public education. Emerging online, these syllabi became an urgent invitation to learn about police violence and Black lives in the United States or an insistence on the history and persistence of Palestinian life and suffering, despite concerted efforts to erase both.24 The online syllabus can also serve as a way to reanimate the internet by drawing people away from the predictable pitstops of social media and back into the warren of delightful and idiosyncratic pathways we might nostalgically recall from web 1.0. This is where the syllabus becomes less a prescriptive list and more an open prompt for curiosity and learning.25 Grasping Soil's syllabus aims to be both a programme that could be followed and something that can be used ad hoc.

Part II: Essays

The essays that comprise the second part of this book each explore a particular moment where communities have intervened with soil to suit a particular need. In examining these engagements with soil, each essay provides a particular view on the social, political or economic conditions that such engagements in the soil reflect and create. These essays range in their disciplinary disposition and in the scope of the case study. But, somewhat by accident, the collection of essays focuses on Germany, the Levant, the United States and East Africa, offering at least two case studies of each place. While this might seem like a limited geography, they nevertheless capture a range of relations that run through the soil – colonial, industrial, capitalist, socialist, agrarian and fascist. The essays are divided into three different thematic subsections within Part Two, but it should be readily apparent that there is generous cross-over: several essays could be in more than one section. The essays also correlate to parts of the syllabus and are suggested reading on the syllabus where relevant.

The essays in the first section capture a variety of efforts to understand, intervene in or remake soil's metabolism. To take something out of or put something into soil is to remake its metabolic life. Sometimes this is done explicitly and other times the renovation of soil's metabolism is an unintentional effect. The accumulation of these interventions reveals how soil is used for multiple things and how such uses run up against one another. In these moments where things enter or exit soil, we can see that soil's capacity for sustaining life sits right alongside its capacity to accumulate harm. In a contaminated world that also is sustained through renewal, we are hard pressed to have one without the other. Soil's metabolic life in turn remakes the metabolic lives of humans and animals whose lives are dependent on soil's affordances in a multitude of ways.

If soil is a container, Johannes Lehmann's essay would insist that we understand it not as a place of inert relegation. Lehmann is a soil scientist who has also helped create the soil factory in Ithaca, New York.26 Among other things, his research has worked to redefine how scientists understand soil organic matter. As Lehmann lays out, soil organic matter is the most important aspect of soil health. It is responsible for nutrient and water retention as well as sustaining soil biota. This organic matter has for centuries within Western science been characterised by the term 'humus' and a process identified as humification. Lehmann argues, though, that, despite the compelling notion of a particular 'humic' substance at the heart of soil fertility, the concept does not stand up to the scrutiny of modern spectroscopy. Over the past two decades, the humic paradigm has given way to a notion of functional complexity as the basis of why organic carbon accumulates in soil. Lehmann argues that this new model for soil organic matter means we cannot simply see soil as a 'storage container' for sequestering carbon, which we can lock up and walk away from. In other words, the notion of a homogenous, essential substance has been replaced with a riotous, complicated and variable community of microbes and minerals that is particularly bound to place and circumstance.

Tamar Novick's essay chronicles the experimental efforts to foster composting in British Mandate Palestine and the role these efforts played in consolidating the legitimacy of the global organic farming movement in the twentieth century. Novick points to the fact that not only can the roots of the movement be found in far-right agricultural politics and fascism in Europe, but they also emerge quite explicitly from colonial contexts too. Places such as Palestine and India served as experimental laboratories for a variety of practices. Within the context of British-ruled Palestine and later Israel, the politics of composting reveal how government bureaucrats thought about the waste of different populations and how it should be managed. Such concerns also reveal a longer running anxiety that coursed through both administrations around the relative fertility of Jews and Arabs both in terms of human populations and their agricultural practices, a topic explored more fully in Novick's recent monograph.27

Emily Brownell's essay examines the connections between the parasites that soil can harbour and their effect on human metabolisms. In the 1970s, Kenya inaugurated a programme to employ thousands of rural Kenyans to build over 3000 kilometres of roads across the nation without the aid of machines. Soon, the project took on international dimensions as an experiment in the viability of appropriate technology as a way to expand infrastructure in developing countries. The scale and scope of the project also made it a particularly good site for other researchers to cohabitate. Most notably, nutrition researchers began visiting the building sites to investigate the relationship between worker productivity and anemia. By drawing blood and taking faecal samples from workers, researchers measured their parasitic 'worm burden'. The essay uses this development project to consider the meeting points of blood and soil in Kenyan history as an ongoing metabolic struggle to capture the energy of workers from competing parasites.

The second section, Residual Histories, explores the many lives of residues – both biological and social – that make their way in and out of the soil. The essays consider residues from generations of agriculture and mining – sometimes in the same area. Together, they capture moments where physical debris and toxic remainders in soil can no longer go unnoticed – they have produced health problems, buried neighbourhoods, killed the microbial life of the soil – and the question hangs in the air: what do we do about this? Do we get rid of the problem or do we effectively bury certain ways of life and accept the necropolitics of such residual afterlives? And most fundamentally, what are the human limits of intervention in the first place?

Jayson Porter's essay follows the creation of the element arsenic in volcanic activity long before life on earth, to its oxidation into a more bioavailable form and finally its various pathways, 'natural and unnatural', in more recent human history in the Americas. The distribution of arsenic within the earth's crust was the fate of plate tectonics and the creation of the geologic formation known as the 'Ring of Fire'. But the distribution of human exposure to arsenic and its alarming toxic effects was determined by the history of empire and racism in the Americas. Porter's essay importantly traces arsenic's trajectory in a way that places mining and monocrop agriculture within the same frame. While arsenic was first seen primarily as a hazardous side effect of the mining industry, it then became a valuable commodity in its own right to use on cotton plantations. When arsenic was discovered to be effective on the boll weevil that was decimating cotton production in the South, Mexican mines became the major supplier. Porter's essay elegantly shows how the legacies of geologic time and combustion were remade into the violent temporalities of extractive capitalism – cutting short the lives of those seen disposable.

Steven Stoll's piece takes us to Appalachia to reckon with the aftermath of generations of destruction from coal mining. The 'holler', a landscape that is synonymous with this region and is home to generations of coal mining families, has shaped Appalachian culture as much as its topography also reflects the region's subterranean coal deposits. In the 1980s, when corporations turned to 'mountain top removal' as a cheaper form of extraction, these domestic landscapes became inundated with 'overburden', the industry term for dirt that was displaced to access the bituminous coal below. Stoll's essay considers what it means for such communities to be submerged in soil and also to lose their ancestors as mountain top cemeteries are either ruined or become effectively inaccessible to the families that have cared for their dead. 'Strip mining is a kind of politics, a form of powerlessness for those subject to it, and a sacrificial economy that would never be tolerated in other locations. It's a distinctive relationship of land – the wasteland.'

Lulu Tessua's essay traces the 'afterlives' of different toxic regimes in the small village of Ndungu, Tanzania. Due to the nature of colonial and postcolonial development interventions, particular places often become palimpsests of experimental efforts once they are first enrolled in an agricultural project. Thus, they accumulate a legacy of pesticide and fertiliser use over generations. Even nearby villages might have very different development trajectories or relationships with soil inputs from those of their neighbors. Tessua writes about what this means for villagers and farmers who are left with what they now see as dead soil and a regime of soil care that demands the constant reapplication of expensive and toxic inputs. Tessua introduces us to farmers and a 'pesticide intellectual' she met during her fieldwork to consider what it means to revive a soil when you don't really know what healthy soil is because it has not existed within your lifetime.

Cynthia Browne's essay traces the transformation of soil matter under the surface in the aftermath of the industrialisation of lignite mining in Germany in the twentieth century. Browne excavates the histories and temporalities that can be found within one patch of substrate engineered as the 'zero point' or 'punkt null' of a new ecosystem. This starting point is an attempt to chronologically reset the clock, designating the rebirth of a destroyed creek. Encounters with scientists systematically observing the site offer Browne insight into the surprises and accidents that punctuate the biographical life of the area following the inauguration of point zero. These unpredictable events call into question how and in what ways legal and scientific responsibility for ecological restoration of the substrate in the wake of industrial surface mining is possible.

In the final section of Part II, the essays explore three moments where soil is wrapped up with the politics and poetics of 'home'. Who gets to claim the right to certain territory is often articulated as a connection to the very soil itself. At the scalar level, nation states are not simply the product of arbitrary geographical boundaries, but they are justified as fortifying natal connections between particular folk and a particular quality of land and soil. While such connections are often expressed in an affective register of love, they are justified through exclusionary projects of knowledge production about race, ethnicity and heritage. These essays can be read alongside the fourth section of our syllabus which also focuses on how soil becomes a metonym for belonging – in affective, political and legal registers.

Paul Kurek's piece takes us from a chunk of glacial till to outer space and back. He takes us on this journey to think through the possibilities and problems of both national and earthly belonging. Kurek's chunk of glacial till comes from the site where the Nazi architect, Albert Speer began in 1941 to build a massive load bearing cylinder (Schwerbelastungskörper). The cylinder was built to assess whether the marshy ground in Germany's capital city would be able to support the load of a triumphal arch three times the size of the Arc de Triomphe, which would announce the victorious Nazi capital 'Germania'. While victory and Germania never came to be, the massive cylinder remains in a leafy Berlin neighborhood. Its lurking presence offers an enticing point of entry for pulling apart the ideology of National Socialism that sought fascist renewal through connecting the purification of German blood to a reclamation of the soil. As Kurek points out, glacial till is itself the result of movement and migration through time. How 'German' then, is this chunk of earth that was designated to hold up proof of fascism's triumph?

In the final essay of this section, Dotan Halevy works through layers of history, sand and soil in the Gaza Strip. In the summer of 1976, an expedition of students and volunteers led by archeologist Trude Dothan set out to uncover a Canaanite cemetery on the outskirts of Deir al-Balah in the occupied Gaza Strip. In carefully chronicling the aftermath of this archaeological discovery, Halevy is able to show the complex ways in which the substrate is both physically and legally manipulated to both sustain life in a dry environment and dispossess Arabs from their land. One of the central questions that Halevy's piece asks is, what is the distinction between sand and soil and to what end are the two distinguished? While such distinctions serve a scientific role in defining the properties of each, they also have a long and consequential political life as well, particularly in arid places.

In closing, we hope this project can have a living, ongoing life. As you read the essays and engage with the syllabus, please reach out to us on the website and let us know what else we should include. We aim to maintain a reading list as new work emerges and hopefully renews and revises how we consider soil and its component parts.

Notes

  1. Young 2012; Abrahams and Parsons 1996; Hunter 1993. ↵
  2. Geissler 1999. ↵
  3. Salazar et al. ↵
  4. For a relevant example of soil’s long life in art and writing, here are poems about eating soil: “Eat Dirt”, “The Dirt Eaters”, “Eating Dirt”, “Dirt Eaters” ↵
  5. This includes work in or on posthumanism, the environmental humanities, the Anthropocene and the climate crisis. To name a few: Worster 1979, Stoll 2002, Sutter, 2015, Cohen, 2019, Rosich and Denizen 2025, Lyons 2020, Zee 2017, Tam 2023. ↵
  6. To be clear, there are past examples of scholars making these connections. Worster 1979 is an important example. ↵
  7. Krzywoszynska 2019, Lorimer 2016, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, le Roux and Hecht 2020, Agard-Jones 2013. ↵
  8. Montgomery 2007. ↵
  9. Puig de la Bellacasa 2015: 691. ↵
  10. Lynch 2019. ↵
  11. DeSilvey 2006. ↵
  12. Tsing 2015. ↵
  13. Ingold 2010. ↵
  14. Salazar et al 2020: 2. ↵
  15. Davis 2007. ↵
  16. For example, the ongoing reappraisal of the peat bog as sink as well as source of energy: Proulx 2022. ↵
  17. Bobbette et al 2021, Cunha 2024, Mabeza 2017. ↵
  18. Held at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 3–5 June 2024: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/event/thinking-substrate ↵
  19. In the first unit of the syllabus, we offer some activities to help practice this embodied relationship with soil. ↵
  20. Creation of life from clay at Wikipedia ↵
  21. Jones 2003: 1; see also Sweet and Sour Soils ↵
  22. Lincoln 2018: 132. See also Kate Brown’s contribution to Zahra et al. 2023. ↵
  23. Wynter 1971. ↵
  24. See for example: #Syllabus, Under Pressure: Representation, Information, and The Archive in Palestine, Palestine from Africa ↵
  25. This website offers a curated set of syllabi with a similar spirit of exploration of the internet in mind: https://syllabusproject.org/ ↵
  26. https://thesoilfactory.org/ ↵
  27. Novick 2023. ↵

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