Telluric Futures and Earthly Struggles in the Americas

Abstract (English)

In Spanish, as in other romance languages, “telluric,” from the Latin “tellus,” is translated interchangeably as “earth,” “soil,” “ground,” “floor,” “land,” “place” and “country,” as if these terms were interchangeable synonyms. But what if the “telluric” were understood as bundling these concepts together? Such a combination would involve connecting what is above and below the earth’s surface, linking the substances, bodies, and networks that bind earth (ground, floor, land, water), to the various materials that constitute it and to that which it produces (humans and other non-humans).

In the Americas, the question of the telluric is bound up in the history of Conquest and the violent processes of primitive accumulation it set in motion. Configurations of telluric force that challenge or refuse scientific and governmental accounts of a single earth and its properties lie at the heart of many movements for the defense of the planet, offering alternative materialities to ground a different, more just, and encompassing collective future.

This panel brings together anthropologists working in various contexts in the Americas to explore the category of the telluric, how it might be reconfigured to think about the materialities of ground, its relation to human and non human life, and its human and more-than-human reconfigurations and transformations. We treat the telluric as a powerful frame for relating to the world and those we share it with.

Contributions explore relations between surface and depth, matter and non-matter, solidity and fluidity, past and present, the inert and the lively, the messy and the purified, all of which have come to define the telluric in a region where specific colonial histories and their aftermaths play out.