Indeterminacy - Waste, Value, and the Imagination

What happens to people, places and objects that do not fit the ordering regimes and progressive narratives of modernity? Conventional understandings imply that progress leaves such things behind, and excludes them as though they were valueless waste. This volume uses the concept of indeterminacy to explore how conditions of exclusion and abandonment may give rise to new values, as well as to states of despair and alienation. Drawing upon ethnographic research about a wide variety of contexts, the chapters here explore how indeterminacy is created and experienced in relationship to projects of classification and progress.

List of contents

List of Figures

Introduction: The Values of Indeterminacy

Catherine Alexander and Andrew Sanchez

Chapter 1. Kept in Suspense: The Unsettling Indeterminacy of US Landfills

Joshua O. Reno

Chapter 2. Experiments in Living: The Value of Indeterminacy in Trans Art

Elena Gonzalez-Polledo

Chapter 3. The Production of Indeterminacy: On the Unforeseeable Futures of Postindustrial Excess

Felix Ringel

Chapter 4. Human Waste in the Land of Abundance: Two Kinds of Gypsy Indeterminacy in Norway

Cathrine Moe Thorleiffson and Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Chapter 5. Waste People/Value Producers: Ambiguity, Indeterminacy and Postsocialist Russian-Speaking Miners

Eeva Kesküla

Chapter 6. Indeterminate Classifications: Being "More than Kin" in Kazakhstan

Catherine Alexander

Chapter 7. The Politics of Indeterminacy: Boundary Dislocations around Waste, Value and Work in Subic Bay (Philippines)

Elisabeth Schober

Epilogue: Indetertminacy: Between Worth and Worthlessness

Niko Besnier and Susana Narotzky

Index

About the author

Catherine Alexander is Professor of Anthropology at Durham University. Before her current appointment, she worked at Goldsmiths for ten years. She has published widely on wastes and recycling – including Economies of Recycling, co-edited with Joshua Reno (Zed Books, 2012) – as well as economic and urban anthropology.

Andrew Sanchez is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on economy and labor, and is the author of Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India (Routledge, 2015).

Summary

This volume explores the indeterminacy left behind by conventional understandings of progress and shows how totalizing forward movement may be resisted by fragments, open-endedness, and the possibility of going nowhere at all.

Product details

• Authors: ALEXANDER, Catherine Sanchez Alexander
• Assisted by: Catherine Alexander (Editor), Alexander Catherine (Editor), Andrew Sanchez (Editor), Sanchez Andrew (Editor)
• Publisher: BERGHAHN BOOKS, INC
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.10.2020
• EAN: 9781789207552
• ISBN: 978-1-78920-755-2
• No. of pages: 210
• Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology; Wyse Social Anthropology; WYSE
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Economy, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General, Political Economy, Sociology & anthropology, Sociology and anthropology