The cases of Lake 513 and Lake Palcacocha are valuable demon-strations of how different forms of narrating the past, developed by several world projects, can clash with each other, sometimes in apparently irreconcilable ways. Both cases show us, following
68 Latour (2017), that it does not make sense to talk about the anthropos in the Anthropocene as a joint project of humankind, as a unified agency. The Anthropocene demands instead that we break down humanity into a vast list of world projects, interests, and, as a matter of concern for this article, forms of narrating past events. By engaging with this diversity of narratives, we are accepting the relevance of all past constructions for making sense of our heterogeneous presents. Universality, as Latour argues, has to be composed rather than assumed. The production of this common world, termed by Latour (2004) and Stengers (2010) as cosmopolitics, is a permanent dispute among divergent world projects that collide into each other in a constant struggle for visibility and recognition. In this manner, overcoming the idea of a unified memory implies overcoming the notion of a unified humanity.
Cases like Palcacocha and Lake 513 should be studied to explore our ability for processing all their stories, connections, and trans-formations of agents into their environments. They show us how memory and knowledge regimes in the Anthropocene work to make sense of those transformations and relations, without sim-plifying the stories of its components into larger narratives but also without reducing everything to mere stories without any sort of connection. And most importantly, the previously exposed cases help us to reflect on the possibility of locating meeting points that allow us to connect the different memory regimes that we can find along the way. Further research on cases like Palcacocha and Lake 513 can enable us to propose connections that, albeit only partially, could help us to integrate diverse world arrangements into a common geostory when thinking about the consequences—and origins—of climatic disasters.
I would like to express gratitude to the members of the Museum Lab and the City Lab of the Institute for European Ethnology as well as the IRI THESys’ PhD colloquium group of the Humboldt University of Berlin and participants of the Atlas of the Anthropocene Symposium. Their feedback and comments were fundamental for the elaboration and improvement of the arguments expressed
69 in this article (I retain full responsibility for the content). I am also deeply grateful to Ignacio Farías, Réka Gál and Petra Löffler for their insightful and valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. Special thanks to all the people from Huaraz, Carhuaz, Llupa, Hualcán, and places nearby in Ancash that agreed to be interviewed for this research. This work was possible thanks to the generous sup-port of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s Doctoral Funding Program.
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Archipalego
Anna Zilahi
The sliding of two tectonic plates into one-another is subsequently no longer subver-sive. No matter whether we’re satisfied with the explanation, the dilemma of evasion or collision does not rely on contingency. Which will curve upwards into the relief of terrain, and which will submerge beneath the cloak?
The isle-arc gathers within a pleat both its past and future: my first breath, as the air forces a path through the mucus, but I am my suffocation too. There are things that even deep sea trenches cannot swallow, it quietly spills its fertile poison along the fault line. To break free, the volatile matter drives the permanent upward. It is not part of the transforming landscape. The permanent is also volatile, but this does not alleviate the entrapment within a phase transition. Heat suddenly floods the plates tautened across one another. The volatile slowly gathers, it impedes light’s path as it condenses. The sea of clouds falls back. If the water-level surpasses itself, it sweeps the permanent beneath itself.
Translated by Owen Good