Essay explores what elemental ethnography can reveal about our relationship with the environment.
The elements are all around us, all the time. They create our context in the disposition of weather. But they also compose us, giving us our bodily form through structures such as carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Elements are also, historically and into the present, objects and processes that comprise and transform the world: earth and wood, air and water, fire and ether, space and metal, cloud and fog. Given all that the elements are, all that they make, and all that they make possible, this essay asks: What might an elemental ethnography offer to us?
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Cymene Howe (2026) studied this question.
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