Sleepless Plains. Fossilisation and Peasant Kinship in Scandinavia
Doctoral dissertation in ethnology (Lund University), Simon Halberg:
What does it mean to live with fossil fuels? This question imposes itself on us with increasing weight when the necessity of living without them becomes harder and harder to deny. Studying farmers in the sugar beet districts on plains of Southern Scandinavia, Simon Halberg’s doctoral dissertation investigates the history and ethnography of a troubled relationship between subterranean energy and everyday life. What practices and modes of life were abandoned when fossil energy was adopted by Scandinavian farmers? How was the transition accomplished? What steps and actions can be detected? What practices and modes of life came as a result? And what were the wider implications for peasant culture?
Based on fieldwork and archival sources, Sleepless Plains proposes an ethnological theory of fossilisation to answer these questions. Integrating ethnological perspectives on kinship with Marxist theories of the social roots of global warming, this book analyses what peasant life has become in the Anthropocene. The goal of the work is to explore how fossilisation has shaped not only the landscape and agricultural forms of life but also dominant ways of thinking about social possibilities. In this light, the necessity of defossilisation becomes an opening to ask what one might do with the landscape and kinship in it in the future.
The doctoral defence will take place 12 December 2025, 13:00 (CET), at LUX, Lund University. Professor Marianne Lien (Universitetet i Oslo) will be faculty opponent.
Everyone is welcome,
Simon