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Document a contamination

You’ve been walking. Observing. Noticing tensions. Now I want you to document something different: a specific moment of contamination.

Tsing writes: “We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others… Contamination makes diversity.”

Scott writes about metis—practical knowledge that develops through encounter, that cannot be codified into rules, that emerges from “knowing this river” not “rivers in general.”

Macfarlane writes about rivers as persons, as beings with rights, asking: “Ko wai koe?” (Who are your waters?)

Your task (do this, don’t just think about it):

Find ONE specific place in Berlin where something that “shouldn’t” be mixing IS mixing. Not metaphorically. Actually.

But here’s the warning: Don’t look for “Turkish” meeting “German” or “Syrian” meeting “European.” Those categories are already contaminated. Someone who grew up in Berlin speaking Turkish and German isn’t “mixing” two pure things—they’re already the contamination as much as everyone and everything is.

Instead, look for:

  • A building material from elsewhere patching a local structure in a way that changes both
  • A word borrowed into local German that now means something slightly different than in its origin language
  • A tree species introduced decades ago that now hosts insects that weren’t “supposed” to be its partners—or maybe an invasive plant
  • A Cold War structure being used for something it was never designed for, changing what that structure means
  • Children playing a game that’s neither “from here” nor “from there” but something new entirely
  • A business practice that works only because it’s adapted to this specific street, this specific mix of people

Document it:

  1. Take a photo or draw it
  2. Describe SPECIFICALLY what’s mixing (not cultural categories but actual practices, materials, languages, uses)
  3. What has been CHANGED by this contamination? (Not what’s been added—what’s been transformed? What can’t go back?)
  4. Whose metis made this mixing work? (Someone had to figure out HOW to make incompatible things coexist—what did they have to know?)
  5. If this place/moment had personhood (like Macfarlane’s rivers), what would its rights be?

What to think about for the next session: How did looking for contamination risk reifying the very categories (German/foreign, local/immigrant, authentic/adapted) that contamination is supposed to dissolve?

The point: Tsing says contamination makes diversity but also: “The diversity that allows us to enter collaborations emerges from histories of extermination, imperialism, and all the rest.” So contamination isn’t innocent. What you’re documenting isn’t “cultural mixing” (too clean). It’s something messier, more historically loaded, less celebratory.


Nur der Text ist unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International nutzbar. Alle anderen Elemente (Abbildungen, importierte Anhänge) sind „Alle Rechte vorbehalten“, sofern nicht anders angegeben.


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (8. Dezember 2025). Document a contamination. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 9. März 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/15aot


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