Haunted Landscapes: An Archaeology of Slow Violence
HAEDEN STEWART, PhD
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
We are living through an era that has been described as “the apotheosis of waste” (Hecht 2018), a globe brimming with greenhouse gasses, mountains of tailings, lagoons of pig-shit, and hangars of acidic sludge. The massive scale and persistence of industrial waste has deformed the globe over the last two centuries. As it decays, industrial waste remakes the bodies, communities and environments that live in its shadow, and it does so in ways that are often harmful and uneven. At the same time, waste is a technique of unknowing and its long-term effects are hidden and vague. The slow violence of this waste emerges secretly, decipherable in ambiguous symptoms and uncanny landscapes, permeating bodies, atmospheres, and epochs. Drawing from archaeological work on two (post)industrial landscapes in Western North America, I argue that the persistence effects of industrial waste on communities that live in its shadow is best thought of as a haunting: a latent presence that is affectively potent and materially effective. Attending to this haunting is not a romanticization of waste’s persistence, but rather a call for a different kind of method and mode of attention.