Indeterminacy. Группа авторов

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Название Indeterminacy
Автор произведения Группа авторов
Жанр Культурология
Серия WYSE Series in Social Anthropology
Издательство Культурология
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781789200102



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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.

      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