An Underestimated Kashubian Matter
Although Southern Kashubia, located in north-west Poland, is mainly noted for its lakes and forests, there is another, at first sight inconspicuous actor, which in my view is even more dominant: the sand. This did not escape the notice of Izydor Gulgowski, alias Ernst Seefried-Gulgowski (1874–1925), one of the first ethnographers of Kashubia, when he stated in his treatise on Kashubia that the area consists almost exclusively of arid sand, on which even the pine plantations thrive with difficulty (Seefried-Gulgowski 1911: 77). While these words already suggest the extent to which sand has resonated through human and non-human bodies and existences embedded in the Southern Kashubian landscape, sand has never been an explicit focus of ethnographic research on Kashubia. This may be due to the strangeness of this matter: in its omnipresence, it tends to withdraw from notice while, at the same time, it raises fundamental questions as soon as it is considered on an ontological level. This may be illustrated by two passages from interviews I conducted with gravel pit workers: “When I come home from work, my wife says, ‘Take your clothes off here, stones fall off you … from your pockets.’ Something always remains. Normal thing. You take a shower, look, damn, in the basin – only sand [laughs]” (interview with D). Sand mostly becomes visible beyond its usual context – when carried unnoticed into a flat or shower – and thus as matter out of place (Douglas 2001: 36). Sand can emerge from latency in the process of speaking and is then able to raise questions about its meaning and agency, as happened in the conversation I had with a head of a gravel mine, a man of about 50:
I don't know if it is the soil. It's typically … the people and the place, rather. The environment, more. Not typically the sand. That you actually like to work in the sand. I wouldn't put so much … You can work well in it. It's not kind of arduous. I wouldn't actually want to work in clay or anything like that. If it rains, you're going to have mud, swamp. Moreover, sand is easier to work with. But … maybe I'm not even aware of it … Maybe it's all because of the sand [laughs] … Another half hour of conversation and I'll realise, damn it: it's all because of sand. (A)
When asked about sand, the informant paid no attention to it, but ended his stream-of-consciousness-like explanation with the words “it's all because of sand”. Thus, the initially inconspicuous actor sand pushed itself to the foreground. But what is sand? An almost infinite accumulation of grains of rock, mostly quartz? How many grains of sand make sand? Since there is an ontological gap between a grain of sand and the abstract entity of sand,1 and because sand is the invisible visible and “unthought known” (Morton 2015: 272) of Southern Kashubia, it has so far been skipped over even by ethnographers. In the course of the posthuman and material turn, I became more aware of the non-human entities and materials of a landscape that remains marked by the end of the last ice age ten thousand years ago. The glacial retreat left large sand masses that made agricultural cultivation difficult on the one hand but let gravel mining flourish on the other. In this article, I ask: Where is sand located in everyday knowledge and experience of the people living in Kashubia? What logic do their narratives on sand follow? How can we describe and understand the agency and power of the invisible visible sandy matter?
I apply an empirical and posthumanist method (Murawska 2023), which means that I take a posthumanist perspective (that to date is mostly theoretical) to ethnographically approach the often marginalised non-human actor sand, thereby pointing to something that lies beyond the human but is at the same time inextricably entangled with it. On the one hand, sand is considered in its human-decentring potential, as it is integrated as an autonomous co-producer of a situated, embodied and sometimes even speculative knowledge production. On the other hand, sand calls for quite human methods like a sensory (Pink 2015) and Stimmung-centred approach. By sensory, I mean engaging bodily with sand, which stimulated in me a sensitivity for what sand does and how it influences Stimmung. To make the experience of being attuned by sand ethnographically and analytically fruitful I work with the concept of Stimmung, which is a hitherto mostly neglected category in ethnology. The concept withdraws from objectification, although it inevitably manifests itself empirically – as a word, concept and experience in everyday life. Heidegger's concept of Stimmung, with which I primarily work here, condenses the multiple resonating meanings of English terms such as mood, humour, spirit, climate, atmosphere, harmony and vibe. For Heidegger, Stimmung “assails us. It comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside,’ but arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being” (Heidegger 1995: 176). Accordingly, Stimmung reaches beyond emotion and the individual; it is not only an inner subjective state, but rather describes the correspondence of entities. As it has no specific location, we can conclude that Stimmung embraces and integrates all entities – human and non-human – in an egalitarian way. As a mode of being in the world, Stimmung is not only reserved for humans (ibid.; see Bulka 2015: 173 and 203) but can be seen as a capacity and constitution of all entities, and therefore also of sand. Considering sand as an attuned matter2 allows to approach its ways of appearing, its agencies as well as the affective dimension of its essence as experienced by humans; thus, it describes how sand makes itself more comprehensible and meaningful to humans.
Attuned by Sand: Source Material and Analytic Methods
It is a hot August day. Driving through the sparsely populated areas of Southern Kashubia, I suddenly notice a veil of sand rising from the forest and field paths. In the light of the afternoon sun flickering between the pine trees, the sand begins to affect me and unexpectedly awakens long-faded childhood memories that lead me to my grandparents’ Kashubian summer house. In my mind's eye I see my parents, at the end of our numerous holidays spent there, carrying out the straw mats that covered the floor of the house to shake out and sweep away the sand accumulated underneath during our stay. The sand seemed to have stored up our holiday time, which presented itself again to my memory on this August day. (Field diary, August 2020)
This field diary entry marks the threshold at which the sand tips from the ontically known to the ontologically thought: From this day onwards, the sand, which in its everydayness and proximity had hitherto remained invisible and unthought of by me, increasingly moved to the foreground of my consciousness. I noticed how it crept into all possible niches of my body and clothes, how it changed my gait as it slipped from under my feet, how its crunching sound accompanied each of my steps, how it filled the air with a sweet tart smell after rain and how it tuned me in different ways, that is, how it shaped my way of relating to the world.
Following the transversal paths of the sand, smartphone photo, Southern Kashubia, 20 August 2018, Oliwia Murawska.
Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 1; 10.3167/ee.2024.540103
This initial experience prompted me to examine the Southern Kashubian landscape from the perspective of sand, following its transversal paths and nomadic tendencies, and listening to its eloquent and attuned matter. Furthermore, it eventually led me towards a sensory and Stimmung-centred ethnography (Pink 2015; Murawska 2020, 2023), an ethnographic approach that combines sensory ethnography following Sarah Pink with a focus on the prevailing Stimmung that the researcher experiences through his or her senses, and mostly in its extremes. Through my conscious perception of the field, the sand began to affect me and I became more sensitive to its Stimmung that pervaded the field. Conversely, reflecting on this Stimmung intensified my bodily experiences (cf. Gumbrecht 2012: 6–7) of the sandy environment. However, to recognise sand and to engage with its expressivity and its multiple ways of appearing, a proverbial grain of sand in my eye was needed: “At face value, there is nothing particularly striking about it, unless one has the misfortune of getting some blown into one's eye” (Baldacchino 2010: 765). The sand somehow kept an eye on me. Tuning in to the specific materiality of the landscape, which, according to Morton (2019a: 57), means to feel its power, is ultimately grounded in the dwelling perspective (Ingold 2000: 185) – the indwelling (Polanyi 1966: 16–18) – in the Southern Kashubian landscape. Although sand as a component of Kashubian Stimmung eluded my reflection until the “attuning intrusion” (“stimmender Einfall”) (Heidegger 2012: 20), it had always and already been known by me.
Sand changing my gait, smartphone photo, Southern Kashubia, 31 July 2022, Oliwia Murawska.
Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 1; 10.3167/ee.2024.540103
In order to capture the aesthetic, sensual, affective and tuning dimension of sand as well as its emergent agency, withdrawing from the linear logic of narration, I additionally worked with photographs, which document and illustrate my sand experiences in the field and build up a supportive layer of narration. Although we cannot form a satisfying narrative representation of the agency of sand, we may capture it through the multilayeredness and simultaneity of photos, which are able to transmit a specific Stimmung captured in the field. Another heuristic tool for gathering material was the follow-the-actor-approach (Marcus 2015; Adams and Thompson 2016: 34–35). Following the sand meant directing my senses towards it, listening to its voice, heard as a faint undertone, as silence or as a sensory impression, observing the assemblages it produced and tracing it in written sources, that is, ethnographic, poetic and prose texts, which I then subjected to a sand- and Stimmung-centred rereading. Moreover, I conducted seven interviews with people working with sand directly, such as farmers and gravel pit workers.3 For the analysis, I have followed Gumbrecht's heuristic for analysing literature, which can be made fruitful for cultural analysis by “reading Stimmung”: Gumbrecht (2012: 13) assumes that focusing on Stimmung allows us to experience texts in a more intense and intimate way. Reading Stimmung and sand out of my interview material is less about deciphering or objectifying them; it rather means discovering and engaging affectively with them, pointing to them, exposing their potential and promoting their mutual encounter. Because sand and Stimmung are often overlooked (in the sense of being ignored), it is important to identify sand- and Stimmung-laden words, tiny but powerful details in the reading (ibid.: 17–20).
A Matter of Stories and a Storied Matter
Sand plays a central role in a Kashubian origin legend (Neureiter 1973: 66–67) that tells of God forgetting Kashubia when creating the earth. An angel laments this injustice: “Just look, O God, at this world, why were you so frugal? Everything thou hast well endowed, only where is the region of Kashubia. Nothing but sand – whole acres of it.” God, who had apparently overlooked the sand, regrets this: “Look at the bottom of this chest and see if there is anything left. All that lies there on the ground, all the gold and diamonds and the cut yellow amber shall fall on this land!” By adorning “the yellow sand with long belts of blue mountains, with pearls of lakes, silver streams and with the sea of amber”, God upgraded Kashubia to “Adam's Paradise”. This legend is reminiscent of a saying handed down in the Bible: “But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand” (Matthew 7:26). With this passage, the injustice done to the Kashubs described in the legend comes to the fore: although the Kashubs are regarded as particularly pious,4 they had to build their houses on sand.
Perhaps it is a coincidence that the aforementioned ethnographer Gulgowski (sometimes Seefried-Gulgowski) settled in a Southern Kashubian village called Sanddorf (sand village) around 1898.5 The source of inspiration for his work was the landscape, over which he enthused not only in his poems but also in his ethnographic treatise on Kashubia. He mentioned sand at the start of his chapter on landscape: “And then there are areas of deepest solitude, where one wanders for hours on sandy paths, between small stunted pines and whole fields of junipers. The landscape stretches out in waves, with dark peat bogs in the sand basins. Here a great silence reigns” (Seefried-Gulgowski 1911: 36). Gulgowski alluded to the aesthetic dimension of sand: “The shores are often bordered by bright strips of sand. When, towards evening, the sun rests on them with its rosy veil, the yellow masses of sand seem suffused with an inner blaze of fire” (ibid.: 38). For Gulgowski, these aesthetic experiences with sand and the unrecognised beauty of Kashubia did not contradict the fact of the unusable, largely infertile soils from an agricultural point of view (ibid.: 35). Rather, for him, everything merged into a specific landscape Stimmung. In the chapter on agriculture, he named the implications of the arid sand or the “very inferior” and “wretched” soils (ibid.: 77) by illustrating them with a humorous anecdote:
Stirring up the soil when sowing potatoes and ploughing again would loosen the sand, which is in itself too loose. A dry wind would carry the sand away with the seed onto the neighbouring plot. Therefore, it could happen to some, like that farmer who had sown turnips and harvested buckwheat. (Ibid.: 78–79)
Sand presents itself here as nomadic, unruly and unstable, thwarting the farmers’ cultivation plans.
The Kashubian writer Aleksander Majkowski (1876–1938) also had sand in mind when writing his heroic epic Life and Adventures of Remus (2008), published in 1939.6 Remus, the hero of the story, sets off on a wandering journey, pushing his wheelbarrow loaded with books to save Kashubia from disappearing. He deliberately visits villages in order to pass on “swords” and “light”, and therefore the strength and enlightenment that should characterise Kashubian identity. Symbolic of this are the tasks he is given: to bring to the surface a castle submerged underground and to carry the king's daughter across deep water. At the beginning of the story Remus introduces himself using a figure of speech based on the proverb “the pen is my plough”, with which he refers to his peasant socialisation and lack of literacy: “my hand learned to work with scythe and plow and I was not with those who did their plowing with a pen and their sowing with sand” (Majkowski 2008: 35). Some key scenes take place on the waters and islands, where the light-coloured sand characterises the shores and the sand below the water: “At the bottom of the river there was glistening white sand” (ibid.: 53). This motif is central not least because Remus finds the bones of his knightly ancestors in the shimmering sand, as well as the sword that is to be used to fulfil his tasks:
In the cavity I noticed there were smooth rocks and yellow sand. When I looked closer, I noticed a black pot sticking out, half covered with the sand. … I lifted the lid and peeked inside. I saw white sand and when I emptied it out, I discovered pieces of bones and ashes at the bottom. I had no idea what it meant. … I stared to scrape with my hands to dig a hole. My fingers caught on something long. I pulled. “It's a sword!” (Ibid.: 58)
The sand reminds Remus not only of his knightly origins and the tasks he has to fulfil, but also of his arduous journey, symbolised by the wheelbarrow he pushes along the sandy path (ibid.: 351). The sand articulates the Stimmung of the landscape and at the same time stands for the tragedy and folly of a hero who is reminiscent of Don Quixote and builds on sand. Like sand, Remus drifts aimlessly through Kashubia and is driven, propelled and occasionally hindered by it.
The Kashubian sand also imposed itself on the Swedish writer Karl Bolay, who travelled to Kashubia for a fortnight in 1979. Enchanted by the landscape, he wrote numerous poems under the title Journey to Kashubia (1982). “The Islands of Silence” is about hiking the landscape: “Without luggage wander / into the grassy paths / of Kashubia / There stars sing / over the waters / sandy paths warm / the bare feet” (Bolay 1982: 8). Just as the hiker inscribes himself in the sand with his feet, so too does the sand leave traces in the hiker's body. In “Tent on the Baltic Sea Beach”, Bolay alludes to William Blake's verse “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, addressing the innumerability of sand and the ontological gap between a grain of sand and the beach: “And every grain of sand / a world in your hand / with suns without number / and each tumbles / from a hollow hand / into the yellow sea / on the sunny beach” (ibid.: 10). In “Kashubian Impressions”, Bolay notes the barren sandy fields, which nonetheless allow for aesthetic experiences: “Millet rye potatoes / grow in sandy fields / and in sparse meadows / cows and horses graze” (ibid.: 22). Perhaps it was his outside perspective that made Bolay sensitive to the aesthetic and seductive powers of sand and allowed him to convey an impression of Kashubia's landscape Stimmung in his poems.
An anecdote that illustrates a human–sand interaction is preserved in the memoirs of German ethnographer Reinhard Knopf. In the 1930s, he stayed illegally in Kashubia, which became part of Polish territory in the 1920s, to collect empirical material for the project Atlas der Deutschen Volkskunde (Atlas of German Folklore). Knopf remembers: “As I was walking along a sandy forest path next to my bicycle … a Polish gendarme constable came towards me, also pushing his bicycle next to him and stomping through the sand in the heat with his heavy boots.” To avoid arousing suspicion, Knopf asks him for directions in Polish. The constable, wiping the sweat from his face with a cloth, gives him the information. Then he begins to rant in German “at the ghastly sand road, with which I [Knopf] agreed wholeheartedly” (Beitl 1990: 91). In the charged situation in which two parties potentially hostile to each other meet, the sand unexpectedly appears as a third actor and defuses it; the whole scene seems enclosed in the Stimmung induced by the sand.
As the analysed sources illustrate, sand as the substance of stories – although subtle in its appearance – is an integral part of the Kashubian imaginary and is considered in both its physical and material and its symbolic and fictional dimensions. Thus, sand not only inspires thoughts and writing, but is also storied matter, and has its own say using human language and shaping Kashubian worlds as a co-author: the stories about physical matter “emerge through humans, but at the same time humans themselves emerge through material agencies that leave their traces in lives as well as stories” (Oppermann 2018: 411). In its eloquence and expressiveness, sand cast in words seems to gather the Stimmung of the landscape.
Sand is a Kashubian primordial substance not only in the origin legend, but also in agriculture. The large sand deposits, as a geologist explained to me, can be traced back to the end of the last ice age ten thousand years ago. The accompanying retreat of a glacier7 left behind large masses of sand on the Southern Kashubian territories, which dictated the conditions of agricultural cultivation: “Tu je pioch!” [“Here there is sand!”], the farmers explain when asked about the soils. However, not all sand is the same; it is multiple, multilayered and contradictory: “This soil is like the cows used to be: one was grey, the other brown and the third? The third one was black and white. It's the same with the soil here: on one patch the plants thrive, on the other they grow miserably” (F). The sandy soil demands from the farmers close scrutiny, long experience, empathy, special care, deep understanding and cultivated knowledge, although even these skills do not provide any guarantees of securing one's livelihood:
These are flying sands. If it doesn't rain, here with us, but it blows, then it's dusty, then you have a sandstorm right away [laughs]. It's not heavy soil, it's light soil, sixth category [the worst soil category that exist]… . The cultivation is difficult. The procedure is the same as for the third category, but the soil that can be cultivated here is about 20 cm under the plough. Further down it's yellow, cultivation-wise this soil … you have to work it a lot, you have to fertilise it a lot, without that it gives bad birth. (D)
Arid sand, smartphone photo, Southern Kashubia, 11 March 2018, Oliwia Murawska.
Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 1; 10.3167/ee.2024.540103
This passage, reminiscent of the anecdote handed down by Gulgowski quoted above, describes the nomadic activities of the sand that has challenged farmers for generations: “The soils have always been arduous for the Kashubs. All the sand, the farmers could not get crops, could hardly harvest grain. … They have always struggled with it. They are struggling to this day” (B). The unruliness of sand is reinforced by the climate: “I remember years when there were such droughts that the oats sown grew like grass in Tibet. One stalk and far behind it another. The areas were burnt out” (C).
Sown oats like grass in Tibet, smartphone photo, Southern Kashubia, 31 July 2022, Oliwia Murawska.
Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 1; 10.3167/ee.2024.540103
Recently, the Anthropocene has been determining the already specific Kashubian climate – “In the past, such violent weather phenomena also occurred, but that was at times. Now it comes blow by blow. There is a kind of compression” (C) – so that the arid sand is now joined by the droughts caused by anthropogenic climate change, making agricultural cultivation almost impossible. The sand lying in the air and crumbling underfoot articulates climate change processes.
Many farmers, who now avoid farming because of the sandy soils, turn to forestry (Dziekanowski 2022: 120–158): “There is a lot of forest because the soil quality is poor” (D). This tendency becomes even stronger in the light of climate change: “I am convinced that all this will soon become forest. All the farms that have soil class six or five, it's all going to become forest because nobody's going to cultivate it” (A). Thus, the landscape dominated by forests can be traced back to the sand lying dormant beneath them, which, not least, also determines the modes of forestry. As only pine trees grow on the sand, large monocultures have arisen, bringing new challenges and awakening fears and worries:
What worries me are the atmospheric conditions. The tornadoes. That didn't exist before. … Now there are these tornados, and they say there will be more and more, that the climate is going to change. That is worrying, the tornados destroy forests, break the trees, everything, terrible. They say everything will change, but the palm tree will certainly not grow here [laughs], or will it … ? (D)
Nevertheless, many farmers feel committed to their sandy soil: “They are so connected to their soil, no matter what it is like. … And it's hard for them to sell it or give it away or something” (A). Regardless of its recalcitrance, the sand, with the Stimmung it arouses, has the power to bind the people working agriculturally with and against it, and to confront them with their being located and embedded in the sandy soils of Southern Kashubia.
Digging Kashubian Gold and Posthuman Stimmung
Only a few metres below the (un)cultivable sphere, in which sand nowadays has primarily a sentimental value, the resources of sand and gravel slumber in the excavatable sphere, which provides work, secures livelihoods and thus indirectly feeds residents: “It's not for eating. [Laughs] I like it anyway” (E). The fact that sand denies its gift in cultivation, but gives it back in mining, is reminiscent of the origin legend in which sand first meant lack and then abundance: “Regarding the soil, no, there we have no profit, because it is a bad soil class, the sixth. But there is something elsewhere, only deeper” (D). Or, “If the soil does not give any income, the earth gives income in another way” (C). Thus, in the sphere of extraction, the sand induces quite different narratives and Stimmung: “And possibly, maybe we are lucky to have soil like this because it is not suitable for cultivation, but we treat this like – damn it – Kashubian gold. One can say that, one can say that. Because profit comes from that” (D). Even if D's initial hesitation gives the impression that it is not easy for the farmer working in the gravel pit to think of the soil as a commodity, the profit is attractive. In the gravel pit, the raw material is extracted in different sizes: Fine sand makes up 70 to 80 per cent (and therefore has a relatively low price), then fine to coarse gravel is more valuable, and crushed stones are the most valuable. These raw materials are used for building through producing concrete, paving stones, roads and asphalt: “You can't make all that from other soil” (D). Although the gravel pits in this area only came into being in the 1970s, systematic extraction is part of a long tradition in which sand means dwelling:
You know the sand for us means people built something, houses. Then they dug a hole in their field, by a cliff, there was gravel everywhere. They dug, added cement and made concrete and bricks out of it … later that is how it all developed … they did geological drilling to see what the resources were. And then it went into the gravel. (D)
However, mining has come at a price, insofar as it means a radical intervention in the environment: “You can't deny that there is a need, but it's not something that renews itself. There is less and less of it in the soil” (A). Not only is the raw material becoming scarcer, the extraction of gravel in a landscape with valuable resources such as pine forests and lakes has negative ecological and social impacts. My informants were well aware of this and they mentioned the environmental damage and the resistance of residents who opposed the gravel pits.8 The fact that the woods are reforested after the work is completed only partly alleviates the unease: “Sometimes my heart hurts when I see this intervention, but then I see the newly reforested areas, the little trees, and they give me some comfort” (A). Further, people console themselves with the argument that the clearing is carried out in “artificial” or “post-agricultural” forests, since in forestry, the pines are usually felled after a hundred years. Recultivation was explained as the restoration of a condition that had already been “produced by man”:
However, where we dig and extract the sand … recultivation is carried out immediately, i.e. we replant the forest, and return the conditions to their original state. Practically only the level changes. Because if you skim something and fill it up again, there is naturally a hole, and we plant the forest there. (A)
“Original state” means the restoration of a cultural landscape. While afforestation is culturalised, gravel extraction is naturalised, following the relatively long tradition of mining gravel and the huge natural sand deposits in this area:
So I think because the sand is actually there, you can say that the mine is part of the landscape. In these areas, where they have practically been there for half a century. Because since the 1970s, the gravel pit was here … . Moreover, that is already half a century. Therefore, I think this belongs here. For natural reasons. Because this matter is here. (D)
Although sand and people are conceptualised here as a natural–cultural assemblage and the interventions are legitimised in this way, there remain “subsidences”, “holes” and descending “levels” that arise reproachfully into peoples’ consciousness and create a kind of moody vacuum: “However, it is clear … you won't be able to recultivate the site as it was before. Unfortunately, the depression remains. Plantings are carried out and they will be like the post-agricultural plantings; the pine, the birch, sometimes a very diverse landscape emerges. But it is not like it was” (C). These statements give us an idea of the quality of the contradictory sand experiences of those working in gravel pits: “There are recultivated areas. But there are these subsidences” (C). In the Stimmung aroused by the sand in which people, sand, forests and subsidences play equal parts, joy about the work, income and profit from the extracted sand is mixed with relief about the possibility of recultivation and fear about the irreversibility of the intervention. This specific Stimmung of contradictions aroused by sand mining also seized me when I entered a gravel pit for the first time:
Between young lurid green groves, a narrow labyrinthine path leads to a landscape formation that is as fascinating as it is dystopian: sand, gravel, monstrous stones everywhere, hardly any people, heavy equipment, sharp cliffs on all sides that have visibly been torn into the earth mechanically and violently. Above, on the frayed horizon, I catch sight of the remains of a pine forest whose trees seem to be desperately grasping with their roots for the soil that will soon be removed. On the way back, I see a deer scampering through a newly created grove lying in a slight subsidence – as if it had already forgotten that there was a gravel pit there not so long ago. (Field diary, July 2022)
Mood swing in a gravel mine, smartphone photo, Southern Kashubia, 16 July 2022, Oliwia Murawska.
Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 1; 10.3167/ee.2024.540103
Apparently, these implicitly known yet mostly unthought landscape formations produced by sand mining were waiting for the attuning intrusion to be discovered and henceforth to attune me to their contradictions. For Rosi Braidotti (2023: 120), such vacillating moods between euphoria concerning astonishing technological advances and periods of anxiety over the exceedingly high price both humans and non-humans are paying are an expression of our “posthuman condition” shaped by the Anthropocene. The posthuman situation in which we find ourselves attunes the gravel pit workers equally in their joy at the possibilities of digging Kashubian gold and their concern about its depletion, as well as the environmental damage that ensues. This Stimmung resonates through what was said and left unsaid by my interlocutors, what was considered and not, what was perceived as visible and invisible in terms of the sand. The mined sand is gone and not gone at the same time, it is displaced: in its absence, it is just as effective as if it were there. The sand tunes euphorically, because it exists and gives; and pessimistically, because it exists and gives only once.
From sand to asphalt, smartphone photo, Southern Kashubia, 27 July 2022, Oliwia Murawska.
Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 1; 10.3167/ee.2024.540103
In its material transformations, the sand awakens a Stimmung in which the contradictions of experiences and affect merge. This can be seen in the example of the increasing asphalting of the sand paths characteristic of the Kashubian landscape. Already the plans for asphalting trigger happiness: “As residents, everyone really wants asphalt. Because you have to drive here every day. … with asphalt, you can drive better. The sand roads are cumbersome” (A). Dust whirls up from passing cars, which settles in the lungs, on windowpanes and in the laundry hung out to dry: “If someone drives by quickly, you can't breathe because of the rising dust” (D). Ultimately, asphalt is a matter of convenience: “We move forward. Today everyone has a car, some machine, a tractor. Everyone wants to drive over smooth roads and not potholes. … You wash the car, then you drive for a week, but, if you have a road like that …” (D). An asphalted road makes people proud, as they see it as a symbol of progress and urbanity. It is also a means of overcoming the sand that dominates the landscape, which is illustrated by the following observation of mine: “a few minutes after a formerly sandy road had been asphalted, a road worker began to use a leaf blower to remove the sand that had meanwhile blown onto the freshly asphalted road” (field diary, August 2022). This curious image refers to the ubiquitous nature of the sand, which tends to subvert human-made systems of order (and, in this way, brings them to light in the first place). The asphalt, itself partly made of sand, was applied by humans to the sandy road to tame the dusty, nomadic, unruly and uncomfortable character of sand, but the latter resists and forces the road worker to undertake curious actions.
Happy nihilism or salvation, smartphone photo, Southern Kashubia, 27 July 2022, Oliwia Murawska.
Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 1; 10.3167/ee.2024.540103
However, the fascination with modernisation through asphalting is experienced alongside concerns about the loss of identity:
A village like B. … because we want to designate new land for the mine there, and we had a meeting with the residents. They said that they would like to have the asphalt up to the church. Here I have such mixed feelings because there is such a beautiful, old Kashubian village. Now we are doing the asphalt, and then? It will disappear. (A)
Increased driving convenience has brought increasing traffic, higher driving speeds and thus the risk of accidents: “You have death in front of your eyes” (G), a pregnant woman commented on the potential asphalting of her village. In many cases, the basic acceptance of asphalting ends at one's own front door: “On my way home, I also have a piece of sand road, and I don't fight for asphalt. I like it as it is” (A). Here, the aesthetic dimension of sand was addressed together with its evocation of rurality: “And if someone has asphalt all the way to their property, that's America, that's not Kashubia” (D). How an asphalted sandy path is attuned to human residents is thus a matter of perspective: It tuned me nostalgically and made me look anxiously at the disinhibited, happy nihilism that progresses until the last patch of earth is covered over. Happy nihilism reduces being to a form of non-existence so that those who think they truly exist can manipulate those who they keep non-existent, a cheerful manipulation for the sake of manipulation (Morton 2019b: 97). Not only do humans leave voids through sand mining, they create a long-term layer of asphalt on Earth's crust elsewhere, too. But at the same time, the asphalt road tuned me towards optimism as it may ensure that an ambulance could get a person to a distant hospital in time. The Stimmung aroused by this asphalting was multiple and was “never the same from day to day” (Heidegger 1995: 177); it vacillated from nostalgia to euphoria. The sand was thus not only a matter of knowledge but also a matter of its knowing us insofar as it directed thoughts, actions and emotions in different, sometimes opposing directions.
Mood swing at the borders, smartphone photo, Southern Kashubia, 5 August 2020, Oliwia Murawska.
Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 1; 10.3167/ee.2024.540103
A Matter of Tuning and an Attuned Matter
In the analysis, a number of connections between sand and Stimmung came to the fore: first as an attuning intrusion, which designated the moment when the implicitly known but ontologically unthought Kashubian sand emerged in my consciousness. This Stimmung that preceded a sensibility and a directing towards (Heidegger 1995: 176) sand was subsequently captured in the field diary entry. In the sand- and Stimmung-centred rereading, it was possible to identify the multiple Stimmungen awakened by sand inscribed in the source texts. The Stimmung-centred analysis of the empirical material aimed to answer my research question concerning the logic of the sand narratives and thus to advance to the attunement of the narratives and arguments and to gain an impression of the qualities of the multiple, partly contradictory sand experiences. Stimmung, which was an instrument for both collecting and evaluating the empirical material, increasingly came to the fore as a research object when thinking about sand. Stimmung, in turn, sensitised me to the complexity of sand and the different experiences of it. As a category, Stimmung is able to address the non-causal, non-linear and emergent nature of sand and the sand experience where the linear logic of narration fails.
If there is a connection between sand and Stimmung, if the sand awakens Stimmung and Stimmung helps people to recognise sand, we may now ask to what extent sand has Stimmung or if there is such a thing as Sandstimmung. The architect Heinrich Seipp would answer this question in the affirmative. According to him, materials not only create Stimmung, but also possess it: Every type of stone and other material undeniably has a specific character, and it cannot be denied that it has its own peculiar Materialstimmung (Stimmung of material), which a sensitive architect or artist must take into account (Seipp 1902: 372). Seipp spells out different types of stone in terms of their inherent Stimmung: While the pure yellow or reddish-yellow giallo stones give a warm, friendly Stimmung, the golden veined portor has a lush, almost eerie Stimmung, and so on.
Consequently, Seipp's reflections give us reason to ask what Stimmung is inherent in the Southern Kashubian sand that a sensitive farmer, gravel pit worker, poet or ethnologist must take into account. The temptation to apply Seipp's concept directly to the Southern Kashubian sand should nonetheless be resisted at first, as Seipp (ibid.: 373) assumes that each substance has only one specific Stimmung attached or given to it. The results of the present study, however, show that this approach is too monolithic, essentialist and reductionist and does not do justice to the complexities of sand and experiences of it. If sand has Stimmung, it is highly multiple and is perceived depending on one's perspective. How the Stimmung of sand is perceived depends on one's own location, one's mental and physical constitution, the horizon of experience and expectation, and even the light and weather. The sand tuned the poet with a cosy feeling as it warmed his feet, it tuned the ethnographer Gulgowski around 1900 towards sentimentality, it tuned the farmer in my data to be proud or anxious, the gravel pit worker to feel cheerful and guilty at the same time. The Southern Kashubian sand resonates through existences and leaves traces in human and non-human bodies, but its tuning is never the same; it flickers, sparkles and transforms incessantly, even when it is not perceived.
How can the Stimmung of sand seize us? According to Heidegger (1995: 176), Stimmung is a way of disclosing everything that exists in the world simultaneously, and thus a way of relating to the sand and its agency. From the idea that Stimmung is located neither inside nor outside (ibid.: 176), we can conclude that everything can be attuned or has Stimmung – including the sand, whose Stimmung transversally flows through all entities connected to it, human beings, pine trees, cars and so on. However, could we not just as well speak here with Jane Bennett (2010) of sand as vibrant matter? Although both concepts, following posthumanist premises, address the timbre and the agency of matter, they go in slightly different directions. The concept of vibrant matter allows us to make statements about the appearance of sand, in terms of its activity, movement or capacity to act as a quasi agent or force with a trajectory, propensity, or tendency of its own (ibid.: viii; see also 32 and 56). In contrast, attuned matter addresses not only what sand does but also how it is, its multiple forms of appearance and its essence, which are intertwined like two different sides of a Möbius strip, which are also the same side (Morton 2019a: 107). Bennett's vibrant matter describes a mode of movement and appearance of matter that is considered in isolation: a stone or a plastic bag vibrates (showing its agency and being noticed). When we speak of attuned matter, the materials (sand, stone, plastic bag) are always integrated into a large whole because, with Heidegger, Stimmung is neither inside nor outside but encompasses everything that is in the world simultaneously: The concept of vibrant matter isolates, while the concept of attuned matter integrates things in the world.
The concept of Stimmung productively complicates statements about the appearance and essence of sand by embracing its multilayeredness and perspective-dependency. As attuned matter, sand can thus be made conceivable in its potentiality and openness. Narratives about the sand in my field experience and interviews revealed not only how sand appears (as Kashubian gold, as sand that is too dry for cultivation or as sand that transforms into asphalt), but also what Stimmung it arouses and thus the Stimmung-setting power it possesses. Stimmung allows us to describe and understand the agency and power of sand and, thus, to think of the infinite appearances and the essence of the invisible visible sandy matter.
In conclusion, an empirical and posthumanist approach encourages us to consider the possibility, the potential and even the impossibility of sand (Ferrando 2019: 170). While we will never be able to take or even adequately describe the perspective of the sparsely growing pine on the arid sand or the perspective of the arid sand on the sparsely growing pine, the empirical and posthumanist attitude helps us to empathically engage with both and to take a new standpoint from which new questioning and knowledge production become possible. A Stimmung-centred approach allows us to rise above the human inability to transpose, insofar as it always reminds us of the embeddedness of all entities in the Stimmung induced by sand. Although Stimmung does not objectify the sand, it encourages ethnographers to consider new perspectives on sand and to pose new questions. To think of sand with and through Stimmung and Stimmung with and through sand means to integrate mentally all the entities located in Southern Kashubia and thereby decentre the human being in a perspective shifted by sand. To follow the traces of Southern Kashubian sand means to attune oneself to a highly tuning and attuned matter. Returning to the last research question concerning the location of sand in the everyday knowledge and experience of the people living in Kashubia, I conclude from the analysis that it is located neither inside nor outside but in the Stimmung.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank both reviewers for their valuable advice and the editors of Ethnologia Europaea for their excellent support of my text.
Notes
Also known as the sorites paradox, occurring with mass nouns that are indefinite and do not have a plural form. When we try to identify something as sand, it is not possible to specify a concrete number of constituents (grains of sand) that it must at least consist of. The term “sand” implies that what is sand remains sand if one grain is removed; cf. Morton (2015: 275).
The official English translation of Heidegger's concept Gestimmtheit is “attunement”; gestimmt is translated as “attuned” (Heidegger 1995: 172).
I translated all sources written in Polish and German (for which there was no official translation), as well as my field diary notes and interviews I conducted in Polish (partly with Kashubian interjections).
Catholicism is an important identity marker for Kashubs; cf. Mazurek (2010), Obracht-Prondzyński (2007).
On ethnographic research in Kashubia see Kwaśniewska (2009).
On Kashubian literature, see Kalinowski and Kuik-Kalinowska (2017). On Remus in particular, see ibid.: 88–92.
On the geology and soils of Southern Kashubia see Mordawski (2018: 18–21).
Local residents have protested against the local authorities’ decisions to expand existing gravel pits (such as in 2022 in the municipality of Kościerzyna) or to open new ones (in 2020/2021 at Lake Mausz in Sulęczyno). Residents emphasised that gravel pits damage the landscape as a common asset worth protecting, also with regard to its touristic value. The noise and dust caused also have a negative impact on the quality of life of local residents. Furthermore, the transporting of gravel with heavy vehicles damages the local roads. For me, as an ethnographer, it was important not to suggest that my informants were the sole perpetrators of environmental damage. The question of how to deal with this was not least a question of research ethics. The gravel pits are a symptom of global Anthropocene processes in which producers and consumers of materials extract and use gravel and sand to build houses or public roads. My research does not address guilt or responsibility, but instead describes sandy assemblages in Southern Kashubian landscape in the Anthropocene.
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