Entanglement
Entanglement describes the ongoing interweaving, of different kinds of things acting at different scales (e.g. mushrooms, pine trees, soils, Hmong-Americans, Japanese buyers, cell phones, property rights, gift-giving customs, markets, etc.), into complex relationships. Often confounded with hybridity, entanglement does not celebrate the collapse of categories or the fusion of humans with nonhumans, material with ideal, culture with nature. Instead, it preserves the possibility of analysis and the potential for fraying that leads to fragmentation. Following one causal thread into the tangle, the analyst (or activist) can expect to emerge grasping another of a different and surprising kind.
Framing statement
Take, for example, the environmental impact of coal mining and power plants and its impact on the indigenous communities in the state of Chhattisgarh in Central India: local, regional, and national politics are explicitly entangled with the imperatives of development and global capital. Obsessions with speculative growth and profit have eclipsed any existing concerns for sustainability. The system, which is built upon a particular impunity toward life and living—human or otherwise—does away with anything or anyone that represents an obstacle. This results in the forced displacement of communities in which people have played the role of caretaker and conservator of forests for centuries. The communities in Gare and Raigarh show that being resolute in resistance demands interconnectedness and interdependence. The struggle is not about survival. It is about living and actively working toward co-creating the environment so that both humans and nonhumans may prosper. In order to rearrange our mental landscapes, we must learn not to pull on one end of the thread, but to engage with the knot as a whole.
Directions
(1) Write an utterance (sound, pronouncement, phrase) matching the category on your paper (e.g. “moo”).
(2) When signaled, vocalize your utterance (e.g. “moo”) until instructed to stop.
(3) Hand your paper to a facilitator for redistribution. Remember your utterance.
(4) Read (silently) the new phrase. Can you identify the person who made this utterance? The part of the room it came from?
(5) When signaled, repeat your original phrase (e.g. “moo”) while attempting to identify the source of the sound on your new piece of paper.
(6) Contact the person making the sound on the paper you’re holding.
References
Arjun Appadurai, “Sovereignty Without Territoriality: Notes for a postnational geography,” in Patricia Yaeger (ed.), The Geography of Identity. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996, pp. 40–58.
Karen Barad, “Invertebrate Visions: Diffractions of the brittlestar,” in Eben Kirksey (ed.), The Multispecies Salon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014, pp. 221–41.
Neil Brenner, “Restructuring, Rescaling and the Urban Question,” Critical Planning, vol. 16 (2009): pp. 60–79.
Pauline Oliveros, “Tuning Meditation,” Youtube.com (posted December 20, 2010), online.
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Resisting Mining
By Navjot Altaf Mohamedi
The process of my research and engagement with indigenous communities that have been impacted by coal mining and power plants in the state of Chhattisgarh, Central India (an area rich in mineral resources), has exposed me to the working of anthropogenic environmental changes in which the intersection of local, regional, and national politics is entangled with the imperatives of development and the power of national and global capital.
The obsession with growth for a selected section of society, in reality, has eclipsed concerns for sustainability and brought about a level of impunity that has been built into the system as well. This has imposed “violence,” by forcibly acquiring indigenous communities’ fertile land, territory, and their rights over natural resources, leading to a degradation of both cultural and biotic diversity and the depletion of soils, denying the people their identity and knowledge to sustain, indigenous life world, their relationship with the cyclical processes of nature, developed systems to cohabit with other species, or a nuanced understanding of ecology and sustenance. These people involved in the long struggle are being strategically dispossessed of the land they have inhabited for centuries.
In Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, he talks about the workings of this type of slow violence, “that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. […] Slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded.”1
Yet, because the focus for “the majority” is on the development and sensation-driven technologies of our “image world,” this form of violence often does not manage to “rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention.”2
Until industrialization erupted in the area, most of the working population was dependent on an agro-based economy. This may be difficult to understand within commonly accepted notions of ownership, because their relationships to the land, forest, or water is rooted in different conceptual frameworks.
Mining is viewed as vital for advancing development by the Indian government, despite the fact that its impact is reckless, and it moves with furious energy in the opposite direction—a direction causing destruction, affecting all forms of life. It is slow violence and “invisibility of the slow violence that permeates so many of their lives. Our media bias toward spectacular violence exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems, treated as disposable by turbo-capitalism while simultaneously exacerbating the vulnerability of those whom Kevin Bales in another context has called ‘disposable people’.”3
By being witness to and supporting the resistance of the above-mentioned communities in Gare and adjoining villages in Raigarh (the northern central part of the state) to the processes of anthropogenic changes, I now understand how a man-made asymmetry is introduced in human relations—an asymmetry characteristic of domination and exploitation—and how “Even in the 21st century, systems are symptomatic of certain ways in which capital and labor congeal in the endless pursuit of profit without primary concern for the nature of humanity and its life worlds,”4 or how people become “disposable.”
But in this case specifically, peoples’ resistance has been extremely stimulating, stressing the fact that the value of (all) life lies outside economic development: “that the quality of being resolute lies in interdependence/interconnectedness […] our struggle is not about survival, it is about living in [the] present.”
Similar to Mahatma Gandhi’s “Salt March,” where he was joined by thousands of people in defiance of the British salt monopoly, on October 2, 2015, more than 5,000 people from mining-affected communities marched from Gare and adjoining villages to the banks of the Kelo River to question a similar kind of uneven development model: to challenge the monopoly of the coal industry and to claim their rights over their land, natural resources, the coal underground, and their right to continue farming. Currently, these people are experiencing the conditions of humanity in the technological age, where natural resources are appropriated inhumanely, at any cost, by the capitalist agenda, in pursuit of fast development and a fast profit and the forms of connection this model produces.
2015 saw their fourth coal march or “Koyla Satyagraha.” A similar movement also took place in the state of Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh district as well.
Struggling communities’ belief in being able to form a sustainable Anthropocene means engaging with, and working toward co-creating an environment that sustains all forms of life and where cultural dynamics are not affected. I believe that it is crucial to understand the essence of “deep ecology,” a term coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, which means asking deeper questions concerning how humans relate to their natural environment. Therefore, we need to deal with layered realities by decolonizing our minds, in order to rearrange our mental landscape; we need to slow down in such complex situations and think deeply about the kinds of hope produced and sustained in the above-mentioned areas, and consider what life-forms are imagined in the Anthropocene.
My own concern while engaging with indigenous artists and communities, including the young, through art activities that are exploratory and collaborative, is to question visual and cultural perceptions, limitations, and conditioning (as we come from different cultural backgrounds), and this has involved constant probing into models of knowledge as well. As Griselda Pollock points out, they could be “based on the premise of an inequality of intelligence and intellect, or on the notion that the person without education is not without knowledge or the means to gather things together to form knowledge […] Intellectual emancipation is the verification of the equality of intelligence.”5
Participant reflection
by Marc Herbst
The Entanglement Group had us making a cacophony of sounds in relation to a dictionary’s worth of conceptual terms—one term of which you were assigned to own, as an identity. I’ll simplify the exercise: you had to figure out who was making your sound while everyone was talking. Reflecting on it, Participant 9 said, “I was sitting between technology and political. I was environment. They were making so much noise, I needed to be quiet. I couldn’t find my partner. I couldn’t fully complete the game.” Play, but play demonstrating one way in which contingent relations become consequential. We all understood the irony of the environment being drowned out by politics and technology and had a laugh about it.
