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 that fall between or outside categories, or find their specificity denied in generic classifications, may strive for formal recognition and attendant rights, or celebrate being outside formal schema, or move between these modes. Anomalous figures may be rejected by dominant societies (as with the Roma in Norway), or brutally made the same (as with Travellers in Norway), may lack the relations that make them a social person, but may also be symbolically potent (the miners) or, as an entrepreneur, may seize the value lurking in indeterminate spaces and times.
The figure of the entrepreneur, who appears in many of the following chapters, incarnates the need for attention to ethnographic normativities. Often an anomalous figure14 herself, the entrepreneur can be cast as the heroic agent of innovation and capitalist value creation precisely by exploiting indeterminacy qua ignorance.15 Alternatively, she can be morally derided for mere speculation, or reconfiguration, failing to produce any genuine added value, or indeed brokering across spheres that should legally and morally remain distinct, as in the case of rent seeking.
One last observation, before we move to our chapters. Arguably ethnography is fundamentally concerned with the mundane spaces where social rules are encountered, negotiated, modified, resisted, reincorporated, appropriated, and so on. Fenella Cannell’s ethnography of power and negotiation in a Philippine community makes this explicit (1999), but this is also the indeterminate space of ethnography itself more broadly. Further, “suspension,” Choy and Zee suggest, “tethers to the ethnographer” a method, or a procedure, that works to render staid common sense into an opening of possible worlds: ethnography constitutes a work of suspension, of assumptions and disbelief, one that not only describes worlds but holds them in such a way as to allow them to settle into different arrangements, possibilities.” (2015: 212). Indeterminacy is at the core of ethnographic engagement.
Catherine Alexander is professor of Anthropology at Durham University, previously Goldsmiths, London. Her recent publications on indeterminacy and waste include a special issue on “Moral Economies of Housing” in Critique of Anthropology (2018), coedited with Insa Koch and Maja Hojer Bruun, and Economies of Recycling (Zed Books, 2012), coedited with Joshua Reno. She coauthored the opening chapter “What is Waste” for the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser’s 2017 report on waste, and has written widely on wastes and third sector recycling in anthropology, environmental science, and engineering journals.
Andrew Sanchez is lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on economy, labor, class and corruption, and is the author of Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India (Routledge, 2016). He is currently completing a project about core conceptual debates in the anthropology of value.
Acknowledgements
It is a great pleasure finally to thank publicly the three anonymous reviewers for their comments as well as the wonderfully precise and careful suggestions from Niko Besnier, Judith Bovensiepen, Matt Canfield, Alanna Cant, Michael Carrithers, Taras Fedirko, David Henig, Minh Nguyen, Felix Ringel, Stefan Schwendtner, and Diána Vonnák. Joshua Reno and Thomas Yarrow have been with this project from before its start to its end; heartfelt thanks for their intellectual generosity and patience. Ilana Gershon’s keen editorial eye effected the final transformation; we owe her much. It goes without saying that remaining faults are despite their best efforts.
Notes
1. Mary Douglas was, of course, discussing dirt not waste, and the two are not always synonymous: wastes can be amorphous, unrecognizable, and hence unclassifiable; or they can be the very stuff of classificatory order, as anyone who sorts recyclates for collection knows. However, there is by now considerable literature where the equation between waste and dirt is made in a way that stays true to her overall argument (as Joshua Reno helpfully pointed out, pers. comm.)
2. Michael Thompson (2017) presented an analogous critique of Douglas’s thesis by challenging the waste/value binary with a third term rubbish, an indeterminate but still, in his framework, a socially-constructed category.
3. Ambiguity is of course a mainstay in literary studies from William Empson’s classic study onward. Note, too, in part homage Namwali Serpell’s Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2016), which suggests that uncertainty is an essentially ethical stance, allowing freedom.
4. Thus, for example, a society that rids itself of a perceived social poison—unwanted people—is, in that act, providing the antidote or medicine to that ill.
