Grain of Salt, Crystallising Cohabitation: Salt-Making as Experiential Environmental Wisdom

The research project considers the traditional craft of salt-making – sea salt production – as an embodied practical wisdom. Salt-making in southwestern Slovenia is known for its scenic landscape and valorised for its cultural heritage. It is, however, rarely recognized for the unique and persisting interlacement between the saltern’s human and non-human actors. The research intends to open an understanding of salt-making as a reflection of the cohabitation of the human and the environment. The environment offers and transmits its wisdom to the human, who, experiencing this wisdom, eventually comes to embody this wisdom. This project aims to provide a novel understanding of salt-making in the field of environmental anthropology by building on innovative transdisciplinary insights from the perspectives of philosophy, heritage, and cultural tradition, community formation, and transformative governance towards sustainability. The central objective of the research is to provide an ecocentral transdisciplinary account of the present-day heritage of salt-making perceived as an experiential wisdom that springs from the unique relationship between the salt-workers and the environment. This will be done through the following four lines of inquiry: 1) gaining ethnographic insights into salt-making as an experiential collaboration between the salt-workers and the saltern; 2) illuminating the relations between the salt-workers and the saltern, emphasising their mutual influence in the formation as biosocial becomings; 3) revealing new ecosophies germinating from these relations that can be regarded as potential fertile ground for 4) re-evaluating the heritagisation of salt-making and the meaning of the saltern for environmental cohabitation. The original ecoethnographic approach of this research includes: a) thinking beyond the division between nature and human, b) adopting post-anthropocentric thinking, and c) considering the context of relationality of beings as biosocial becomings. It is supported by ecocentral transdisciplinary grounds, allowing for cross-pollination of insights, and opening of a space for potentially emergent ecosophies that are formative for the tradition of salt-making itself. Special attention will be given to the elements – water, air, fire, soil – that are crystallised and concentrated in the grain of salt. Thinking through philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gaston Bachelard we will strive towards a formulation of a new elemental ecophenomenology. The aim of the project is to introduce the present-day salt-making to the local community, interested public, and scientists, from a novel perspective of an experiential environmental wisdom. This ecocentral research will be performed with long-term field work. Researchers will take part in the process of salt-making at the Sečovlje Salina Nature Park. They will engage with the community and the environment of the saltern. Many of the methods used in the project are part of fieldwork research, the principal one being participant observation. The saltern will be the central source of data collecting, observation, participation, experience, and sharing ecoethnographic insights. Other important specific methodologies are: embodied critical thinking, micro-phenomenology, walking seminars, and elemental ecophenomenology. The research will be implemented by an interdisciplinary research team that will offer a solid background for formulating an ecocentral transdisciplinary and innovative account of the salt-making heritage.