The visualization is intriguing --it shows a burial vault and plants which look like un-planned growth all around it. The author's argument here is that the vault aims to keep the human body separate from these other organisms and processes of decay, through the vault. It is inevitably a process that hinges on containment as well as its failure.
I wonder if the author can do more with the visual to show the liminality of enclosure/spilling out in this kind of burial. The overgrowth around does some of this work, but what are some other ways to highlight this? Visually enhancing this image to show the cracks in the concrete, the weeds etc could be one way to do this, though this might also reify the boundaries between the different elements. Or perhaps making these different elements of the image blurry in their boundaries?
This is an image created by the ethnographer. It zooms into the different material elements that constitute a burial plot and vault.
The most interesting aspect of this image is that it doesn't show straightforward forms of toxicity. One form of toxicity that comes through in the argument is the separations of death from different organisms which the ethnographer suggests holds other "Social statuses". Expanding on this would help highlight the toxicity at work here. Another toxic dynamic at work is what the ethnographer calls the individualizing of responses to death.
This photo essay responds to Murphy's assertion that toxicities are 'wayward particles behaving badly'. The images and annotations focus on non-living materialities which signal a more complex interplay between 'waywardness' and control, the contrasting agency of toxic elements and the agency of humans. The essay mocks human's desire for control whilst showing the power they have yielded over environments in efforts to prolong bodies.Taking the images alone, I am struck by the complex presence/absense of human life, where the material is made to signify human effort.
I want to hear more about who these people are, in the cemetry. Where is it? Burial practices, approaches to death, and to the environment, are tied up in culture. I want to know what this says not about humanity, but about a particular way of living and of dying.
I am not sure whether these are found images or created by the ethnographer. These images are precise, clean, documentary-style. In the first image, I am getting an overview of something. I am about to learn. I am a safe observer. And then, in the second image, I am drawn deeper in. If there were a third, I would expect to be underground, interred.We move along a vertical plane. The feeling this movement gives is one of growing vulnerability. But still, in the second image, I am allowed to stand at a safe distance.
These images do not need enriching. They are stark for good reason: they suggest that they will keep the viewer at a safe distance, but, with the movement of the images from the arial to the ground view, that safe distance begins reducing. I want one more image to complete the narrative arc, underground.
This essay tells me that toxics are not created without a fallible, possibly self-harming, human agency. The human agent is needed to enter into a relation of power with the environment. It tells us that even in death, the human agent transforms the environment - it does not simply return to the earth, but continues to press its desire to be prolonged upon it. The essay extends our appreciation of when toxicities can be produced beyond human life, beyond the moment of death and into their non-life.
This image and its caption demonstrate the long journey for the ethnographer to the field site, in this case quite literally. Your journey started at a conference some time before (it is not clear when the photo was taken - this could be useful information in the caption perhaps) when you first met Dr. Mar. But it also required there having to be a field trip to be invited on, being invited to attend the field trip, and the slightly more obvious physical journey including undertaking a multi-mode transport route to get there.
