The Mountain Unearthed: Uncanny Geological Futures in a Mongolian Mining Town
E51-151, Cambridge, MA
Please join us on Tuesday, October 27th at 5 pm in E51-151 for a lecture by cultural anthropologist Jessica Piskatá, titled "The Mountain Unearthed: Uncanny Geological Futures in a Mongolian Mining Town." The Mountain Unearthed: Uncanny Geological Futures in a Mongolian Mining Town Geological futures engage a timescale which is both beyond the scope of human life and, in Mongolia, intensely engaged in the present everyday of those who are living. This paper draws on the concept of the uncanny, which has been used by theorists of climate change (Ghosh 2019) and the more-than-human (Fernando 2022) to grapple with that which is likewise untranslatable or unfathomable in scale. Here, I return to its use as a domestic horror aesthetic (Freud 1919) in order to analyze a critical description of two monstrous forms from Mongolia’s mineral extraction boom: the spoil heap and the leach mine. Using the uncanny in this way allows us to engage with the ambivalent ecological horrors of mineral extraction, which are both eldritch in scope and deeply intimate. About Jessica Piskatá Jessica Madison Pískatá is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the relationships between humans and…