| Title | Unit 4: Soil as Belonging |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Dotan Halevy (author) |
| Basil Ibrahim (author) | |
| Paul Kurek (author) | |
| Steven Stoll (author) | |
| Landing page | https://www.whpress.co.uk/publications/2025/11/05/graspingsoil/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Dotan Halevy, Basil Ibrahim, Paul Kurek, Steven Stoll |
| Publisher | The White Horse Press |
| Published on | 2026-03-01 |
| Long abstract | Soil underlies human activity and society in a very physical and biological sense. It’s the literal foundation for any kind of be(long)ing, because the cultivation of land feeds our bodies. However, human attachment to soil often includes a series of abstractions, transforming soils from a physical substrate into owner- ship (like property in land), or place (homeland, locality). Both senses relate to the words belong and belonging, which come from older Dutch and Ger- man words for demand, obtain, reach for and long for. What is the circular feedback between the conception of land as an object of belonging and soil as a container and enabler of life? How do we grapple with the differences or similarities between feeling tied to a particular place on earth and a political project that aims to tie belonging to the soil through a rhetoric of blood, purity, and ultimately violence? |
| Page range | pp. 59–67 |
| Print length | 9 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
| Media | 4 illustrations |
Dotan Halevy is an environmental historian of the modern Middle East and a senior lecturer at the department of Middle Eastern and African history at Tel Aviv University. His current research project, Settling Sands: Commodification, Displacement, and the Modern Coastline 1900–1970, explores how the Eastern Mediterranean coastal plain, sparsely populated for centuries, emerged in the modern period as an aggressive frontier of economic and political expansion.
Basil Ibrahim is an independent researcher and writer based in Ithaca, New York. His research explores the political life of voluntary associations, in particular the mobilisa- tion and sustenance of collectives as a mechanism for social and economic insurance. He works historically and ethnographically and has collaborated with Amiel Bize on several projects on urban and rural life in East Africa.
Paul Kurek is a Postdoc in the Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor of Ger- man at the University of Michigan. His current book project, Heavy Load-Bearing Modernity: A Cultural Geology of Albert Speer’s Berlin/Germania, unpacks the intellectual and material history of the so-called heavy load-bearing cylinder, arguably history’s heaviest memorial.
Steven Stoll is Professor of History at Fordham University. He is the author of Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (2017). He is writing A Word For Land: How We Relate in the Spaces We Create, to be published by Yale University Press.