Of Geosocial Relations and Separations

Abstract

How might an attention to the role that the geologic plays in everyday social and political formations help reveal and politicize the geographically, temporally, and stratigraphically distributed forms of violence in the Anthropocene? Building on recent work in environmental humanities, anthropology, geography, and feminist geophilosophy that aims to rethink racialized forms of violence alongside planetary forces and earthly formations, this article explores how geosocial relations and exclusions register distributed forms of violence that are often kept separate from each other. Through an ethnographic account of a state-led oil shale exploration project in southwestern Turkey during the eruption of war between Kurdish freedom fighters and the Turkish state in southeastern Turkey in the summer of 2015, the article traces the links and disjunctures between the everyday disavowal of resource exploration and colonial warfare. It explores how the disavowal of war and hydrocarbon exploration forecloses political and ethical possibilities. It further examines how emergent geosocial relations between people and rocks carry the possibility of reckoning with anti-Kurdish war and violence. In doing so, the article invites environmental humanities to rethink methodological and analytical ways of rendering violence visible. The article concludes by speculating about the possibility of geosocial solidarity, or a mode of relation with geological formations and humans that forges connections between racialized forms of othering and planetary scales of time, space, and materiality. As a mode of earthly praxis, geosocial solidarity is what might come after the unfinished task of detangling distributed forms of violence in the Anthropocene.