Sensing, tracing, walking: Phenomenological investigations of ruins and afterlives of projects

Abstract

Recent years have seen growing scholarship on ruins and afterlives of projects framed around a range of contexts – modernity, colonialism, infrastructure and international development. While much of this literature overlaps with phenomenological preoccupations – notably, embodied and affective interconnections between people and places – few of these studies directly engage with phenomenology. Acknowledging some scholars’ discomfort with the term, we are inspired by the critical turn among phenomenological thinkers to propose a closer conversation between the two bodies of literature. Such conversation, we argue, can enrich our understanding of ruins and afterlives with further philosophical, conceptual and methodological underpinning. In particular, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork on the remains of a colonial-cum-development intervention in southern Mozambique and on methodological directions oriented around movement and walking. We thus show how, in post-project contexts, phenomenological perspectives can help to trace intimacies between humans and the more-than-human away from grand narratives and consequentialist ends, and to understand experiences of ruins as embodied, affective and embedded within specific socio-historical contexts.