Spirits in the Mudflats: Nils Bubandt’s “Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene”
Nils Bubandt is a professor at Aarhus University, the largest and second oldest research university in Denmark, as well as editor in chief of Ethnos , an international, peer-reviewed journal of anthropology. He’s contributed to a wide range of publications, including A Non-secular Anthropocene: Spirits, Specters and Other Nonhumans in a Time of Environmental Change , the third volume in a series of “working papers” published by AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene) and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet , the anthology in which the essay we read, “Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene” can be found. One of the main issues Bubandt addresses in relation to the Anthropocene is the blending of human and non-human causality in relation to natural disasters: “undecidability, I will argue, is simultaneously the signature characteristic, the curse, and the promise of our current moment.” He points to Lusi, a mud volcano on the north coas