with Cymene Howe, Rice University, Houston, Texas.
Rapid changes to cryoforms — such as glaciers, sea ice and stands of permafrost — are indicative not only of mutated ice conditions, but allegorical to the ways that human history has become enacted upon “nature.” The minor time of human existence, and its period of colonial industrialization, has carved out signals and indexes, curving in particular ways both the ontology of ecological systems and human social life. This paper draws from ethnographic fieldwork in Iceland focused on cryohuman relationships historically and in the changing present, including conversations with glaciologists, preservationists, glacial guides, and communities near ice forms as well as samples from scientific and media sources that portray the mutations of ice. The theoretical work of the paper balances upon Michel Serres’s concepts of “the hard” and “the soft,” the former being the adjective associated with the physical sciences (and thus “Nature”) and the latter being diagnostic of a socioanthropological domain, where the (seemingly) mutable truths of culture live in contrast to the experimentally inscribed “facts” that populate material sciences. For Serres, “hard” is given, while “soft” is made. In this paper, I take the coordinates of hard and soft quite literally as sensory encounters: how hard ice is made soft through human contact. Melt is, in this context, a sensing project of cryohuman attunements.
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