Indeterminacy. Группа авторов
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another kind of intertwining of waste and value via a carbon sink project in Madagascar, which gathered weight and funding thanks to fallow land being constructed by project officials as both unrecoverable and potentially recoverable waste. An imagined future scenario of degradation from slash-and-burn cultivation is pictured as being “avoided” or “offset” through the project’s reforestation activities. This accounting legerdemain created the fallows as essentially indeterminate, creating one kind of value via carbon credits. But this is not a hopeful story: the farmers who were literally cast out from their lands are effectively wasted. The politics of such accounting techniques are that different parties enjoy the benefits and suffer the losses.
Wastes are not simply transformed into value in these acts. Rather, the condition of indeterminacy can be seen as a mode between, or as encompassing, waste and value. In some cases, it is a threatening, negative force, sometimes translated into wastelands and waste people, sometimes a necessary imaginary to allow the economic, rehabilitive value of an alternative route to be realized, but also exists as a mode of limbo or suspension that may never be resolved, recombined, or incorporated. This in-betweeness operates temporally as well as spatially.
Engaging with emic ideas of worth uncovers contested ideas of what constitutes waste and value in a given ethnographic moment. Crucially, the moment of apparent transition from waste to value may remain unresolved or indeterminate. This is the moment that interests us. We include in this idea, as one example, lands that have been irrevocably polluted and stripped into sterility by industrial mining or the toxic chemical by-products of value production.13 Abandonment or containment are typical responses, the latter sometimes in the hope of a future technology appearing that is able to undo toxicity. Again, people may articulate a sense of being left behind by rapid and extreme social change, for whom there is less a sense of “progress toward,” than daily routines of getting by, a modest intentionality. Again, we sound a note of caution about taking such lives as intrinsically those of either resistance or oppression. Some ethnographic studies suggest marginalized people may disregard any time but the present, subverting the rather Protestant notion of the present as a site of suffering to be overcome through careful planning. In this model, marginalized people resist by performatively stating that the true domain of suffering is the future, mitigated by the impulsive act of living for the “now” (Day, Papataxiarchis, and Stewart 1999: 2). Fatalism does not always lead to present impetuosity, or a positive emic take on it.
The final inspiration we take from negative dialectics is that apparent “fragments” are not necessarily part of, nor destined to be incorporated into a whole. Many of our contributions explore tensions between imagined totalities (e.g., nation-states) and mundane experiences. Our chapters speak to an unpredictable world, partly apprehensible, where the multiple ordering regimes of modernity rely on the constant production and expulsion of putative excess. Many of the essays in this collection suggest a means of representing and of being in the world as fragments, non-unitary subjects, and things, with incomplete perspectives and understandings (Candea 2010; Strathern 1991). In what follows we outline our chapters’ main contributions to understanding indeterminacy ethnographically.
The first three chapters explore open-endedness in quite different contexts, each of which reveals tensions, or surprises, between ways of knowing and managing (landfill containment, defining people, urban planning) and material or human refusals to conform to such determinate visions. Thus suspended fragments in a North American landfill generate unpredictable contamination (Reno); British trans artists’ embrace of mutability in life and work inhibits access to rights through formal recognition (Gonzalez-Polledo); German postindustrial infrastructure is successively planned, redundant, and repurposed (Ringel). The following three chapters examine demographic politics from complementary angles, how internal and external others (Roma and Travellers) are marked as indeterminate waste in Norway (Thorleifsson and Eriksen); how Russian miners who were “left behind” after the end of the Soviet Union in Estonia and Kazakhstan now find themselves unvalued (Kesküla); and how repatriated Kazakhs in Kazakhstan are simultaneously welcomed and rejected as excessive to the country’s enterprise (Alexander). As many of these chapters uncover, one form of indeterminacy, whether imposed or embraced, often creates others. Our final chapter explores this explicitly through people classed as surplus labor in the Philippines, who now work as waste pickers (Schober). Despite the range of contexts, certain common themes appear, as the following sketches out.
The will to control through fixity, numbering, containment, and classifications, is typically manifested through the modern state, which expels, forcibly assimilates, or “digests” in Cathrine Thorleifsson and Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s striking metaphor (see also O’Brien 2003), those who do not fit. But as Thorleifsson and Eriksen show for the Roma in Norway and Elisabeth Schober for waste pickers, one means of doing this is by imagining indeterminate wastes that migrate across domains linking wayward pollution, chaotic material wastes, and unclean people that together threaten the literal and metaphorical health of the body politic. Shifting perspective shows different responses.
Schober shows how waste pickers contest classifications of “surplus” or “wasted” labor by remaking their lives, redetermining the discards of others into a valuable resource, locating ever finer intervals in the value chain where most see only indecipherable waste. In this way, they demand formal recognition of their lives and labor. Moreover, she highlights the failure of terms such as precarity and wagelessness to capture the nuances of how people live through, off, and alongside processes of capitalism. The trans artists described by Elena Gonzalez-Polledo experience the politics of recognition and indeterminacy quite differently. Seeking in their lives and art to escape formal determinacy, they find access to rights and resources denied and may strategically move in and out of accepting “labels” and medico-legal models in order to subsist. Thus the politics of recognition and redistribution merge in the tension between wanting recognition but not codification. Ringel’s description of the unanticipated ruins of industrial infrastructure, which actively inhibits future municipal development, is neatly offset by a group of residents in a rundown region who value their houses’ dilapidation as a means of resisting gentrification. Ringel’s point, as urban infrastructure is rendered superfluous then repurposed, is that, with each new direction, indeterminacy only appears as a retrospective point of surprise.
Both Kesküla and Alexander’s ethnographies illustrate people mourning the classificatory frameworks offered by former modernist states for the social, moral, and monetary value they once conferred. In the former account, Russian miners find they are no longer a distinct category of prized worker but lumped together with other unvalued manual workers, even though the product of the miners’ labor, energy, is vital for the national enterprise. Their sense of dislocation is partly expressed through constant comparison with other workers, ethnic groups, lands, and times. They fit with none of them.
Joshua O. Reno’s focus on the fragment reminds us that most analytical approaches fail to account for the part that belongs to no whole nor has a trajectory other than material decay. Not all wastes are ripe for conversion to value. Such present-oriented moments reappear in Ringel’s account. The landfill serves as both metaphor and case study of the indeterminacies that emerge from techniques of control. Attempts to manage unruly wastes through containment are always incomplete as leachate and gas escape. Essentially indeterminate, biogas can only be partly trapped and converted to value. For an emergent politics of indeterminate wastes, the question is not whether they can be known or not, but if they can be known enough to act upon: a matter of degree instead of binary determination.
Thus we explore what happens when binary categories or ideas as containers of meaning clash with complex lives and materials that overflow such attempts to hold them fast. Repatriated Kazakhs, for example, seem to show an excess of qualities that demarcate “Kazakhness,” potentially diminishing other Kazakhs by comparison. Further, they seem to conflate distinct times, embodying the past in the present, and remind unwilling neighbors that population and labor force numbers also refer to human beings. Numbers and categories, Alexander suggests, are essentially indeterminate proxies for reality. As both Reno and Alexander show, excessive regulation can create gaps between laws that, like anomalies, are often profoundly ambiguous.
Individuals