Histories of Extraction, Toxicity, and River Ghosts on and Beyond the Page

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Douglas, Lee. 2025. Histories of Extraction, Toxicity, and River Ghosts on and Beyond the Page. TRAJECTORIA. Anthropology, Museums and Art, 6, ISSN 2435-4074 [Article]

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Official URL: https://trajectoria.minpaku.ac.jp/articles/2025/vo...

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This editorial introduction contextualizes three multimodal interventions that take seriously ethnographic methods while also emphasizing the potential of experimentation. It does so by describing how the authors of the pieces included in this special issue interact with still and moving images—how they take, collect, print, and juxtapose these visual traces—to produce (audio)visual reflections that explore how humans interact with landscapes affected by histories of toxicity, extraction, and pollution. It argues that the authors’ sensorial engagements with rivers, deserts, and arctic territories make it possible to understand more complexly how communities make sense of climate crisis and its everyday effects. Given that the authors and image-makers showcased in this special issue work across different media forms—from the filmic to the photographic, from the digital to the analogue—the text is also a reflection on the potential of multimodal scholarship and the role of platforms and initiatives that make it possible to make public work that straddles the ethnographic and the aesthetic. Finally, this introduction considers how multimodal anthropological scholarship can invent new ways to visually evidence the depth and breadth of ecological crisis, as well as the urgency with which we should consider how ecological violence operates socially and politically, but also visually and textually. Here landscape and ecology—memory practices and archival interventions—all serve as a point of departure for rethinking the transformative potential of visual ethnographic methodologies that—be it in or beyond the page—make visible and narratable the violence of extraction and the social value of engaging with environments and ecologies in more sensorial and active ways.

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Article

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https://doi.org/10.51002/trajectoria_025_02