Indeterminacy. Группа авторов
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.
5. There are others, of course. For example, Sarah Green’s (2005) account of the Balkans that describes external discourse that insists “the region is fluidity and indeterminacy personified, right on the surface, a completely explicit fog, as it were” (2005: 12). It challenges modernist accounts of statist drives to clarity, but are also partly reproduced locally, and, as Green suggests, partly constitute lived experience. Both Green’s book and Matei Candea’s (2010) on Corsican identity, which also works through external and internal insistence on indeterminacy and partiality, are themselves presented as provisional, open-ended, and fragmentary.
6. Thus despite the fact that capitalism and state socialism have been ideologically portrayed as opposites, Susan Buck-Morss emphasized how, in the twentieth century, these two forms of organization were profoundly entwined, sharing eighteenth-century philosophical roots and a passionate belief in the emancipatory potential of industrial production for creating mass utopia (2000). Earlier, Keith Hart flagged the ideological projection of difference between capitalism and socialism during the Cold War while they had never been closer in practice (1992).
7. Note also Andrew Sanchez and Christian Strümpell (2014) for a different setting of prescriptive Marxist thought.
8. Although Bataille uses both surplus and excess in The Accursed Share (1991), there is a sense that it is the latter, as superabundance, which forces expenditure, or wasting-as-luxury (or sacrifice and war). Excess is the accursed share.
9. See Charles Taylor’s 1992 account of contemporary political demands for recognition on the grounds that recognition and identity are fundamentally linked.
10. Or highlight alternative classificatory systems and discursive formations historically (Foucault 1994) and through ethnographic comparison.
11. Article 1 of The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as someone who has fled his or her country “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” and sets out the legal obligations of governments toward such people.
12. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous paradox for rule-following encapsulates some of the experiences explored in our chapters of attempts to engage with the state and its representatives: “This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer