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Abstract

Drawing on two months of ethnographic fieldwork in West Virginia, this comparative study explores the generative capacity of the “geomyth” (Vitaliano 1974) as both an analytical framework and literary-ethnographic method for capturing the experiential realities of ecological violence in central Appalachia. In particular, I examine how crumbling infrastructures, wasted landscapes, and volatile substances left in the wake of Appalachian industrialization – a material-semiotic assemblage I refer to as “modernity's corpse” – is mobilized across the social world, inscribing upon convergent scales of earth, flesh, and psyche the conditions of possibility for capitalism’s malignant reproduction. By exploring the schisms between two distinct spheres of West Virginian cultural life after the perceived “death of coal” – spaces of socio-environmental abandonment on the one hand, and a palatial estate, fallout shelter, and defacto center of political decision-making on the other, I aim to break away from the waifish arms of the “suffering subject” (Robbins 2013) and gesture instead toward an anthropology of vengeance. In essence, this means grappling not only with lived experiences at the limits of worldly habitability, but also with the warped fantasies, charismatic forces, and historical imaginaries which seek to bring that world to its end.

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