Blog | Materialität

This blog article explores the elusive materiality of the Yellow Sand phenomenon: The sandy dust that originates in the Gobi Desert and travels above all of Asia, carrying hazardous components. What does it mean to ethnographically research something barely visible? What happens if we take Yellow Sand’s materiality seriously? How do we write about a phenomenon with no clear spatial or temporal boundaries? Here, CRC 1265 researcher Margherita Tess reflects on ethnography's communicative possibilities for dealing with hyper-objects, the atmospheric, and the refiguration of spaces in the Capitalo-Anthropocene.