Indeterminacy: Waste, Value, and the Imagination: 7 (WYSE Series in Social Anthropology)

ISBN 10: 1789200091 ISBN 13: 9781789200096

Publisher: Berghahn Books, 2018

Synopsis

What happens to people, places and objects that do not fit the ordering regimes and progressive narratives of modernity? Conventional understandings imply that progress leaves such things behind, and excludes them as though they were valueless waste. This volume uses the concept of indeterminacy to explore how conditions of exclusion and abandonment may give rise to new values, as well as to states of despair and alienation. Drawing upon ethnographic research about a wide variety of contexts, the chapters here explore how indeterminacy is created and experienced in relationship to projects of classification and progress.

About this title

About the Authors

Catherine Alexander is Professor of Anthropology at Durham University. Before her current appointment, she worked at Goldsmiths for ten years. She has published widely on wastes and recycling – including Economies of Recycling, co-edited with Joshua Reno (Zed Books, 2012) – as well as economic and urban anthropology.

Andrew Sanchez is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on economy and labor, and is the author of Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India (Routledge, 2015).

Edition details

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1789200091
• ISBN 13: 9781789200096
• Binding: Library Binding
• Number of pages: 230
• Editor: Alexander Catherine, Sanchez Andrew