Mixed Matter

Abstract In the past three decades, the Lebanese coastline has emerged as a focal point for ongoing struggles on matters of environment and enclosure of coastal spaces. At a public beach in Beirut, environmentalists strive to counter privatization and protect sand from natural and anthropogenic threats. This article focuses on the role of sand in these environmental and urban contestations. It joins discussions in the environmental humanities on the political significance of relational materiality as a core Anthropocene concern. As sand mixes with waste, microplastics, and life, it is also traversed by human histories of leisure, technocratic environmental knowledge, economic interests, and struggle for coastal commons. These mixtures of sand gain relevance as technocrats inscribe value to it, as environmentalists work to purify it of troublesome entanglements, and as citizens flock to it for leisurely enjoyment. Complicating Bruno Latour’s call to compositionism, ethnographic attention to compositional politics reveals the unequal footing between sand and its human and nonhuman interlocutors. Sand as mixed matter, through its material characteristics and contextual entanglements, makes evident a compositional politics of the environment and urban space. Mixing and unmixing, sand charts a coastal politics of enclosure, commons, and efforts to recalibrate the wider political economy of Lebanon.