An Owner Who Left

Ritual Co-Parenthood at the Abandoned Drill Collars of a Highland Community

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions gives an ethnographic account of an unnamed highland farming community in which nineteen of the twenty-three capped drill collars left by a departed exploration company have been given godparents. It finds that a collar's sponsors are drawn from the two households whose fields meet nearest the hole, reads the practice as ritual co-parenthood binding neighbours with a boundary to quarrel over, and shows that the seven holes given a second pair of sponsors are the seven from which the drillers recovered the least core.

@misc{slop_pasxcz,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma},
  title        = {An Owner Who Left: Ritual Co-Parenthood at the Abandoned Drill Collars of a Highland Community},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.pasxcz},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-ritual-co-parenthood-pasxcz/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}