expect employees to have their own life/career projects carefully articulated with the greater whole; those who do not subscribe to, or find themselves tangential to the latest institutional or state developmental mission or vision, are increasingly ripe for being “managed out” or cast as wasted (see Bauman, 2003).
But ethnographic attention allows us to see that a Baumanesque classification of outcasts as wasted lives is to fail to see gradation and difference, where tactics of imagination and reclamation may come into play, where value may be recovered both from rejected materials and by people whose labor is excessive for a profitable enterprise. Simply to call these wasted lives is to recapitulate analytically the expulsion into indistinction that modernity has inflicted on them. Rather, we suggest that, while regimes of modernity expel lives, materials, and places as excessive, the tension and often ambiguities of these indeterminate states can allow meaning and value to be remade, suspended, or lost. If capitalism itself is predicated on imagined futures, (Beckert 2016), then so, in theory, people can reimagine their own futures.
The next insight derived from negative dialectics is that progression to another state (whether a future condition, revaluation, or reincorporation) is not to be assumed. This is most easily seen in the complex relationships between waste and value that are imagined, practiced, experienced, and theorized. Thus waste can be matter out of place, its expulsion a restorative act of ordering. We know enough now to recognize that one person’s or system’s waste, might be valuable in another instance (Reno 2009). But one implication of the emphasis on structural/contextual understandings of waste (changing a waste object’s context can mean it is suddenly valuable) is that it appears as though wastes invariably contain the seed of value if they can only be placed again or converted, and indeed that all valued objects and people in turn contain the potential to be wasted. The relationship between waste and value is more complex and varied than that implied by the “matter out of place” maxim. One is not necessarily the simple inversion of the other. This is where indeterminacy provides a useful third term. Wastes can be indeterminate (value never) in the sense of a forgotten or postponed limbo, unattached in terms of property rights. Or indeterminacy can simply be a state where either, neither, or both negative waste and positive value can be discerned or imagined.
Examples of such an imbrication of waste and value, or rather, the precondition of an act or representation of wasting to release value are found in Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) and Sara Peña Valderrama’s work on carbon sink accounting (2016). In the former, intensive industrial logging renders the land unable to support life except for one kind of fungus that thrives in such territory—and turns out to be a prized delicacy. Hope appears among capitalism’s ruins.
Peña Valderrama illustrates 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
