In the 150 years since its construction by the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, the periodic table of chemical elements has become both a ubiquitous and iconic expression of scientific thought. In its tidy arrangement of substances, identities, atomic weights, and other properties, it illustrates the chemical sciences’ ontological argument about the elemental and universal structure of nature. As Michelle Murphy (2017, 495) has argued, this same "functionalist bent" leads to the problematic governance of chemicals as discrete entities, obscuring the complexity and inequity of our respective entanglements with toxicity and its infrastructures. The essays in this series take an ironic stance towards the functionalism and naturalism of the chemical sciences, nominating materials, beings, forces, and other entities that are elemental to our present anthropogenic predicaments. From sodium fluoroacetate, a common pesticide used to "control" rodent populations in countries such as Aotearoa New Zealand, to malhar, an Indian raga that is believed to inspire the clouds to rain, these critical and creative essays respond to a dire need to question universalist classificatory systems and to theorize the elemental in situated ways.
References
Murphy, Michelle. 2017. "Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations." Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4: 494–503.
Posts in This Series
An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: An Introduction
In the 150 years since its construction by Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, the periodic table of chemical elements has become an iconic and ubiquitous express... More
Compound 1080 (Sodium Monofluoroacetate)
In 2018, six dead birds appeared on the steps of New Zealand’s parliament. The activists who delivered them claimed these precious natives were poisoned by 1080... More
Aquifers (or, Hydrolithic Elemental Choreographies)
Shaped by the legacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century geological thinking, popular ideas of the underground replicate two primary figures: the mine and the... More
Calcium Carbonate
Think of a mineral chronometer, a stone that tells time. In your mind, it appears nonliving and inert. If you believe, like Martin Heidegger, that humans are un... More
Cement
Cement has a good claim to being the first Anthropocene element. Through the alchemy of cooking limestone, humans redirected rivers, leveled mountains, extended... More
Ice
It’s hard, when among ice, not to hunt for melt. In our Anthropocenic epoch, ice is an element that is steadfastly bound to descriptors like fragile and in retr... More
Magnesium
A flight takes off from Kathmandu and miniature bottles of water are distributed to passengers. The contents come from the Aravalli Range in northwest India and... More
Malhar
I invite the reader to journey with Malhar—a seemingly embodied anthropogenic negotiation with the clouds of the monsoon. In this entry for the Anthropogenic Ta... More
Mercury
Sara bends over the fire holding a black karai.1 After a long day processing the 25-kilogram bag of “waste” she purchased last week from a neighbor’s mineshaft,... More
Mold
Indoor air is largely ungoverned breathing space. As a result, there is much we don’t know about air quality in domestic dwellings. Although a few substances—ca... More
Poly- and Perfluorinated Alkyl Substances (PFAS)
It was late July in the rural outskirts of Darwin, a time of year when locals are repaid for the stifling humidity of northern Australia’s monsoon with frequent... More
Phosphorus
[L]ife can multiply until all the phosphorus is gone, and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent… —Isaac Asimov, "Life’s Bottleneck" ... More
Seeds
If seeds are elemental to plant life, safeguarding them is tantamount to the safety of plants and, by extension, humanity. Saving seeds saves the planet. This l... More