From shorelines remade by sea level rise to extractive enterprise, urban construction, and rural terraforming, sand is a preeminent indicator of human-induced global disturbance forming the substrate of Anthropocene lives. Drawing on case studies from Asia and Africa, this special section centers sand in ethnographic inquiry to argue that matters of sandy admixture are ripe for theorization, comparison, and informed engagement of planetary change and provide an impetus for methodological innovation. For geoscientists, sand is distinguished from other rock-based sediments in terms of size. The authors' approach reaches beyond issues of strict scientific classification to cover sandy matters more broadly, such as sediments born from bodily and consumer waste, construction debris, and industrial tailings. The authors argue that these anthropogenic outputs are increasingly difficult to separate analytically or mechanically from organically or geologically generated substances as human extractive and productive endeavors intensify. Through examinations of Congolese sand divers, Beiruti environmental activists, ghosts of Malaccan development projects, and sewage-clogged waterways of urban Addis Ababa, contributors develop three analytic optics rooted in anthropology's empiricist legacy to capture sand's distinctive socialities and materialities. The first, "granular particularism," offers a framework to trace the heterogeneous materials and scales of intertwined human and geological substances and practices. Second, attention to "sedimentary configuration" provides a means to the play of fixity and flow characterizing sand-based geosocial formations. Finally, the notion of "compositional politics" makes evident the unsettled alliances and inherent inequalities between human and more-than-human actors that derive value from sand's utility to fostering life and livelihood.
Once a vibrant trading hub in Southeast Asia, the Malaysian port city of Malacca is now part ghost town, part real estate development. Built on the prospect of transforming Malacca into a tourist magnet and a node in China's Belt and Road Initiative, hasty reclamation and exaggerated sales promises have turned the coastline into a mud field and the construction sites into ruins. Driven by national and transnational interests, sand is made operational as a medium of economic transformation and political consolidation. Taking the silted Straits of Malacca as a point of departure, this article proposes a reading of land reclamation aimed at transforming sand into fixed forms against the unpredictable vibrancy of the matter. As fieldwork reveals, mudskippers thrive, and locals claim unexpected agency in the mire of Malacca's near abandonment and the decaying remnants of past and future urban designs. Attention to the structural potential of sand's granular physics unsettles practices of environmental control and financial speculation, highlighting the ambiguity of contemporary processes of urban transformation. Substrate and effect of the ongoing limbo that conflates urban and economic development strategies and postcolonial identity politics, Malacca's coastline comes to express capital flows as partial and unstable sedimentation.
The tidal Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, USA, presents a waterscape at once singular and uniquely local while also typical of a novel ecosystem. Heavy with centuries of legacy pollutants from coal and oil refining, the river water presents a liquid archive with few finding aids, catalogs, or guides. Propelled by a fundamental paradox (if "wisdom sits in places," how do we know "forgotten places"), this article considers a series of collaborative learning experiments animated by insights from academic and community researchers about Black ecologies. It traces a series of public environmental humanities experiments undertaken over a five-year period in and with the river's historic wetlands and their various communities. Sharing insights from insurgent learning practices, the article aims to further the environmental humanities' transformational premise and promise to envision and foster more just futures. As we, academic researchers, have learned with and from community partners, we have sought to make mutually beneficial work, including much that hardly resembles conventional academic outcomes. A "living" digital river archive offers a compendium to the article.
Over the past decades, underwater mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo shifted from free diving for diamonds to diving with slowly fine-tuned and motorized "sand-suckers" for gold and 3T (tin, tungsten, tantalum) minerals among the sandy tailings of river bottoms. This article decodes how Congolese miners navigate tributaries of the Congo River basin and earn a living in rural parts of postcolonial war-and landscapes. It offers an ethnographic account of a distinctive historical memory and technical and geocoded lexicon used by miners: assembling, touching, and composing their informal practices amid hydro-, atmo-, and geosocial encounters. Here, the sandy nature of the mineral resources highlights an analytic frame to consider the present logic of capital, with Congolese miners converting sandy residues from earlier production cycles into capitalist value and reengineering and fine-tuning their extractive gear. From reading underwater composites to reassembling sprockets, this article follows informal profit-sharing practices that emerge from it. In these compositional economies, capital accumulation is translated from resource to residue through seasonal and technologized reshuffling and the regenerative practice of unmixing composites in sand-laden remains.
