Magnetism of strangeness: Silenced histories of landscapes

Abstract

ABSTRACT Why do certain parts of landscape become places for waste disposal? This simple question seems to be easy to answer given the existence of sophisticated tools for formal modelling of a range of environmental, economic, social, and political variables which are supposed to minimize risk, cost, and disequity. There are, however, more subtle factors that shape waste disposal and its inscription in landscape. Using examples of two Czech landfills and drawing upon my ethnographic research of wastescapes, I examine how history, economic interests, social practices, events, material indeterminacies, and multispecies encounters took part in the transformation of these places into loci of ‘strangeness’. Using a metaphor of magnetism I refocus our attention to a capacity of strange entities such as garbage, rubble, military waste, dead bodies, animal farms, and shooting ranges to attract each other along a spatiotemporal continuum. I argue that strangeness sticks to places and tends to perpetuate itself through a series of ‘magnetic’ relations over time. This magnetism stems from the human propensity to classify and dispose of entities whose open-endedness is dangerous and must be controlled through placement. While this process of placement is often imagined as a management of absence, I point to a dialectical relationship to the opposite category of presence as a critical source of magnetism. Waste management, then, becomes envisioned as part of a more general social process that keeps the world meaningful.