FRIAS Kolloquium - Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko

Voyagers from the Depths of Time: Spirits, Plastics, and the Living Tide of an Indian Ocean Island

The increasing speed of capitalism over the last seventy years has relied on material support, best exemplified by capitalism’s own wunderkind material: plastics. Although an increasing number of plastics have been made to be used and discarded as if they were essentially ephemeral, transforming the decayed matter of the past into the mass production of plastics has created a material that stubbornly persists. By looking at how people use and are inundated with plastic items, this talk will investigate how the inhabitants of Christmas Island view their autonomy and/or enmeshment, both economically and temporally, in a world where plastics effortlessly cross boundaries, through trade networks and with the currents of the Indian Ocean.