The Adventures of Form

 

Nonliving beings make worlds, and stories, through their physical form—just as living beings do.  The adventures of infrastructure as form take us beyond its designated role as service provider into feral territory, where it hooks up with all kinds of creatures, human and nonhuman, living and not, and both generous and deadly. This talk takes listeners to the town of Sorong in Indonesian Papua, where Indonesian settlers have overwhelmed and displaced Indigenous Papuans through infrastructure. Infrastructures here can be suffocating and violent as they transform the land; waste places can be gifts. The talk follows physical forms in action in building the settler city, complete with its chronic floods, disappearing plants and animals, and still remaining, if largely unrecognized, spaces of refuge.

 

 

Anna Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at Aarhus University in Denmark.  Her most recent co-authored book is Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature (Stanford University Press 2024).