Wind’s Animacies

This is an article about wind, dust, and their relations to life. It is a meditation on the liveliness of wind and airborne particles as they are experienced on the ground; in cultural texts including film, poetry, and oral history; and in the medium of satellite imagery. In dialogue with recent work in the social sciences and humanities that demonstrates how air and dust from the “South” are treated as foreign “intrusions” into Europe, this article proposes a focus on wind’s animacies to further probe and nuance these claims. Situated primarily in Italy and the Balkans, two places where the author has familial relations and, in the case of the Balkans, deep ancestral history, the animacies of wind are examined specifically in relation to Scirocco and Jugo , two interrelated southerly winds commonly blowing in spring and autumn that sometimes bring “Saharan dust” to Europe. As a framework and scaffold, the article draws from Mel Chen’s notion of “differential animacies”: the ways animacy is bestowed on humans, animals, elements, and objects in hierarchies that are both revealing and “leaky.” Exploring the animacies of Scirocco and Jugo shows how the wind acts as a force of de/humanization, as agency leaking across borders of life and nonlife, and as shape-shifting coauthor of collective memory.