1991: 61; Tsing 2015: 28), which resist neat narratives of containment or restoration. Such accounts of remediation, however, are confronted head on by a queer ethics of hybridity, personified by the figure of Nuclia Waste, a drag queen who exuberantly foregrounds the excess and permeability of the entire environment and herself to nuclear contamination (Krupar 2012). Guy Schaffer further reminds us that queer theory is concerned with “uneven remainders, things that don’t fit neatly into categories” (n.d.), that “trash” unites wastes and camp alike and that camp itself is “a mode of aestheticism devoted to excess, to failure, to ironic detachment” (ibid.), a refusal, we might say, to be integrated. Such practices align indeterminacy, unruly wastes, and queer theory, recasting indeterminacy as a mode of potentiality, resistance, escape, creativity, and improvisation (see Gonzalez-Polledo this volume; Morgensen 2016;).
In just such a light, recent scholarship in the social sciences, arts, and humanities has characterized indeterminacy as a necessary space for creativity and cultural improvisation (Hallam and Ingold 2007). Howard Becker describes artworks as fundamentally indeterminate, only existing within each moment of re-creation (2006: 23). Feminist and queer theories also invite us to consider mobility rather than stasis, processes of becoming rather than fixed categories, and the generative power of ambiguity. They also ask us to think how metaphors and performances of indeterminacy can be mobilized to resist social classification and control. Or indeed, how ritualized gender transgression, as in Gregory Bateson’s (1936) account of transvestism during Naven rituals among the Iatuml of Papua New Guinea, can establish/reaffirm hierarchical, gender binary relationships, thus highlighting again the complex relationship between indeterminacy and classificatory systems. Gilbert Herdt’s work on the imaginative possibilities of the “third gender” suggests another reading of Naven transvestism whereby such performances indicate the “abandonment of absolute contrast” (Herdt 1994: 41; see Halberstam 1999).
J. K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist approach to political economy echoes these moves in its criticism of what is called the overdetermination of spaces, a capitalocentric, analytical tunnel vision that fails to see spaces of opportunity and alternative imaginaries (2006). Debates on imagination’s preconditions again insist on the apparent freedom offered by indeterminacy (Rapport 2015; Sneath, Holbraad, and Pederson 2009). And just as imagination projects forward, so radical indeterminacy has also been described as a requirement for hope (Miyazaki 2005 following Bloch 1995) and the crucial conditio sine qua non for an ethical stance of openness. Roughly speaking then we are faced with analytical approaches to indeterminacy that counsel only either hope or despair.
We end this section with Felix Ringel (2014) and Stef Jansen (2016) who both highlight an emerging strand of ethnographic writing that privileges the social significance of indeterminacy. Critically engaging with Hirokazu Miyazaki and Ernst Bloch’s analyses of hope, Jansen notes that recent anthropological attention to indeterminacy has allowed ethnographers to embrace global capitalism’s apparent “loss of direction” and to create new methodologies that consider the significance of exclusion and the emic inability to predict change through time (Miyazaki 2010: 250; see Bloch [1959] 1986; Ringel 2012). However, both Ringel and Jansen observe that many anthropological engagements with this topic deploy a Deleuzian analytic that overly fetishizes processes of “emergence and becoming” (e.g., Anderson 2007; Biehl and Locke 2010; Pedersen 2012). Such ethnography can too easily settle for “uncovering and valorising sparks of indeterminacy” instead of interrogating how they are formed and where they lead. Like Jansen and Ringel, what concerns us are the social effects produced by these sparks, which we trace by emphasizing ethnographic rather than analytical normativities. In the final section, we describe what our ethnographies of indeterminacy reveal.
Conclusion: Ethnographies of Indeterminacy, Waste and Value
We approach indeterminacy and its relationships with the material and metaphors of waste and value through two closely related steps, both of which draw on Hegel’s idea of recognition and Adorno’s negative dialectics.
Our first step is to explore indeterminacy largely as an issue of classification and mis- or failed recognition of that which cannot be easily incorporated into classificatory systems. We do this by interrogating how the mechanisms of power and resistance play out in classification and indeterminacy; how people negotiate mundane knowns and unknowns and confront foreshortened futures; and how the state reads its citizens and is in turn read—or dissolves into illegibility that is resistant to encounter. And while indeterminacy can foreclose engagement with a person or institution that cannot be discerned, or can create a space for personal rule and corruption (Reeves 2015), there are instances where people may embrace ambiguity via a multiplicity of meaning, refuse categories, and find other ways of counting outside dominant classificatory modes (Alexander and Kesküla this volume). One implication of rejecting an imposed category is that the system or imagined totality that gives that category meaning is also implicitly rejected. Thus, the unhappiness of both the expatriate Russians in Eeva Kesküla’s chapter and the repatriated Kazakhs in Catherine Alexander’s are caught up in their repudiation not only of how they are treated, but also of the system, or the new totality, in which they find themselves. They are denied full citizenship rights but some at least, in turn, deny the state (see Simpson 2014). While the power difference scarcely needs to be spelled out in such reciprocal refusal, there are suggestions that the state also needs, in part, these recalcitrant people. The integrity of the modern nation-state and the modern human subject is challenged by, and yet requires open-endedness and mobility.
This might suggest a structuralist approach to categorization and its antinomies, returning to Douglas’s classic definition of dirt as matter out of place (1966). The power of her observation is that a bewildering array of “wastes,” and the visceral revulsion that may accompany them, are culturally determined. However, thinking with the third term, indeterminacy, which may be negatively or positively valued, or neither (suspension), or both, complicates this approach and reveals (as in Thorleifsson and Eriksen’s contribution) that quite different instances are merged and lost in the category of “the anomaly.” At the same time, emphasizing those or that which is expelled may reveal contestation over who and what represents order. Finally, instances where an element may fit with the dominant order, but excessively so, or simultaneously possess wanted and unwanted characteristics, can threaten to shatter categories from within (Alexander this volume).
Our second step is the familiar anthropological argument that indeterminacy, as a mode of apprehension and being, can complicate modernity’s grand teleology. We focus on areas where movement, change, and transformation are not always predictable or follow more modest ambitions than state-driven narratives of an ultimate social or organizational whole to which progress is being made. But there are also instances where people neither resist nor counter teleological visions, even after the collapse of animating state regimes. Rather they may hope for the return of such projects, grieve their passing, act as though they still exist, or simply transpose the logic to a new context. Three related insights from negative dialectics follow.
The first is that state (or indeed international agency development) projects are typically based on a teleological vision of time; after all “to project” implies just such an engagement with the future. But change may be unpredictable, rarely proceeding according to a predetermined telos. This echoes interventions from Science and Technology Studies (e.g., Bijker 1995; Bijiker, Hughes, and Pinch 2012; and Latour 1996) that trace the contingency of successful technological developments, inventions, and the happy (but not inevitable) coalescence of enabling factors in the successes or failures that later come to seem predestined (see Ringel this volume for a comparable account in the case of urban infrastructure). Some ideas succeed and others fail to be taken up.
By focusing on lives outside formal scaffolds of developmental progress, we describe instances where people have been expelled from or denied full participation in mainstream societies, have embraced formlessness and open-endedness, or settled for getting by, muddling through, and attending to the job at hand. We also include those who align themselves with previous grand narratives and lost
