Waste is not the end. For an anthropology of care, maintenance and repair

This special section, coordinated by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Elisabeth Schøber, should not be seen as residual in the discipline, but treating matters of substantive importance such as the connection between human activity and the increasing production of waste, what characterises place-making, and the dialectic relation between cleanliness and social order. Yet this themed section might serve to explore the always complicated question of how to move further for the scholarship on waste too. The four articles gathered here share an emphasis on the materiality of waste and how it is part of a social entanglement. They show the diversity of current discard studies, a field characterised by a critical examination of what is systematically left out and devalued.

Overall, the themed section provides some crucial insights on how waste is a multi-scalar phenomenon, defined differently by different actors. Empirical evidence from multiple contexts is used as illustration of the exclusion of growing numbers of people, a marginalisation which appears not simply as economic but also temporal (Frederiksen 2015). Among the excluded and made superfluous, the figure of the migrant remains still as a transgressive presence, politically charged by defying the lines of order and purity. In her article on the actual disposable strangers, Cathrine Moe Thorleifsson engages with Douglas's axiom (1966) that things are defined as dirt not because they are unhealthy, but because they transgress particular cultural categorisations (generating dissonant and abject affects). She argues that in Hungary, the crossing refugees were made expandable and dehumanised through discourses associating them with the discarded items they left behind en route. Pollution, waste and questionable economic productivity were then invoked to justify their exclusion from national territory, reinforcing in turn the symbolic and administrative boundaries of the country.

The idea of waste has a particular ability to absorb ethical and aesthetic concerns, as well as a capacity to distribute things in space through notions of disorder, abjection and disgust. When people and places become associated with waste, they may be seen as waste themselves, disposable and superfluous, reduced to zero value. Waste always occupies the negative side in dichotomies such as efficiency and inefficiency, usefulness and uselessness, order and disorder. It is therefore part of what Zsuzsa Gille calls a 'waste regime' (2007), referring to the representations, practices and politics of waste that constitute societies and their values and relations to profit. Waste is the by-product of the systematic ordering and classification of matter, in our societies co-related with modernity and the values of efficiency and productivity (Scanlan 2005). However, in

provincialising the understanding of waste we discover a more complex picture, in which the very constitution of waste is 'subject to huge variation across societies – and debate within them'. By analysing what type of problem is waste in Egypt, Jamie Furniss shows how the definition of cleanliness is correlated with social order and articulated by language, and hence is at the core of the conception of human hierarchies.

And yet, there is still a lingering question: does waste have to be identified and enacted as such or does it exist independently from cultural categories? In other words, how does one begin to talk about waste? Defining the contours of waste has been taken for decades as an anthropological problematic, being likened to rubble (Gordillo 2014), debris (Stoler 2013; Ssorin-Chaikov 2016), marginalia (Gandy 2013), ugliness (Novoa forthcoming), ruination and pollution (Olsen and Pétursdóttir 2014), the subaltern (Buchli and Lucas 2001), the unbecoming (Gregson and Crang 2010), the unwanted (Sosna and Brunčíková 2017), the opposite to civilisation (Winegar 2016), what has to be concealed and hidden (Åkesson 2006), negligence and human failure (Lynch 1990), the exercise of power (Ferguson 1994), a tool for urban speculation (Martínez 2017a), as well as 'alluring trash-capes', 'everything plus time' and 'things that have been emptied of desire' (Thill 2015).

In or out, waste is a matter that takes place and has a territorial etymology – vas-tus. In 'Untangling translocal urban textures of trash: plastics and plasticity in Addis Ababa', Caroline Knowles tackles the issue of place-making through the lens of plastics – as a substance and as a metaphor. Waste makes places in the form of dumps and landfills, which are occupied by 'scratchers', who scavenge its materials and share expectations for a different life. We see then that waste is part of the centrifugal and centripetal forces of Addis Ababa, since plastics shape the dump, and the dump shapes the urbanity of the city. As Knowles explains, substances such as plastics are translocal, passing through sites and being part of what makes the periphery marginal and the centre a core. After all, waste is not simply a symptom of culture and social relations, but a material that has effects and affects, signalling the vitality of the inorganic and the un-becoming within our networked world (Gregson and Crang 2010; Reno 2015).

In 'Not so much the water as what's in it', Michael Thompson and Bruce Beck foreground that matter has a habit of misbehaving. As they put it, purity is nothing else than an entelechy, since matter is in a state of constant becoming. In a way, this assumption is related to Thompson's formulation of waste (1979) as something in which a form of value dies, while another can be born. Its original postulate foregrounded that un-becoming was part of the life value cycles of things, whereby objects may lose and later regain value owing to shifting cultural valuations. Yet in this new essay, Thompson and his colleague take a rather indolent – giving a shit – 'alles scheisse' approach: 'If the whole world is made of shit there is no point in trying to do anything about it', ignoring, however, that it is without maintenance and care that the world descends into disrepair and dereliction (Bond et al. 2013).

This polemical assumption brings the question of how to develop this field of studies. Taken together, the special section extends further the scholarship on waste, yet it lacks a prospective and proactive approach on practices of discard and waste making. Discarding is an increasingly charged act, a means through which people articulate both an ethics of care and moralities of practice (Gregson et al. 2007). We can even say that waste is the opposite of commitment, care and sustainability. Indeed, waste may be seen as nothing more than a symptom of a failed relationship, in the form of unfinished repair or reconstitution (Chapman 2016). Waste entails a contagious disinvestment and disaffection, or even desolation and abjection, which reveals gaps in the prevailing narrative of

evolution and rationality. On the contrary, the enactment of care is a matter of everyday interaction, manifested in the form of affirmative micro-politics and affective transmissions, which inject kindness, welfare and integration, generating in turn a shift of values (Thrift 2005; Stewart 2007; Navaro-Yashin 2012). As services collapse and infrastructures fail, alternative modalities of sociality come to the fore (Rakopoulos 2016).

This special section of SA/AS reminds us that we should also look at waste face-to-face, instead of doing it only just from above. An inspiring example of this was William Rathje's Garbology project (1996), in which he investigated fresh garbage as if it were an archaeological material, 'studying consumer behaviours directly from the material realities they leave behind rather than from self-conscious self-reports'. Traditionally, waste has been taken as an indivisible remainder of withdrawals and extractions, yet its very materiality, with differing specific properties, renders waste amenable to different operations and reconsiderations; for instance, by propelling the mind backwards when the thing was in full usefulness or simply appeared contextualised in a different time and space.

A study of the discarded and the dissipated make visible the 'orders of worth' that sustain the arrangement of things (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). As a social category, waste is intimately related to shifting cultural values and performance (we also waste time, money, food, love, beauty); it is thus embedded within living relations, falling out of the routines and practices of the ordinary (Cranq and Gregson 2015). Waste is always categorised and generated within a frame of value, equally relating to temporal regimes and the constitution of cycles – life and death, profit and loss, use and abandonment. The management of waste is therefore not only a problem for engineers, machinery and transportation; it also refers to social habits, cultural representations and political hegemony. As Douglas formulated (1966), waste is connected with notions of value and the processes of ordering. In her view, the constitution of waste has two phases, first the categorisation of what does not fit and rejection due to being 'out of place'. Second, a process of dissolving any characterisation (rotting), which utterly leads to its disintegration and loss of identity.

Abandoned industries, rusting machinery, obsolete power plants, decaying buildings, chemically polluted zones, environmental catastrophes and debris have for decades symbolised the 'collapse' of the USSR, displaying the break-up of the regime in its more literary and material sense. This gave the impression that communism, toxicity and the production of waste could not be separated and produced a physical abjection towards that era and all that it meant. James Ferguson (1999) defined this adjustment as an 'infrastructural abjection', which designates certain aspects of social life as residual, beyond institutional care, ex-pulsed, thrown down, humiliated. Soon after its breakdown, state socialism was described as wasteful, symbolically polluted and economically out of order, not separating the consequences of the 'collapse' with the socio-material effects of the Soviet regime. As waste, the Soviet past was automatically associated with inefficient practices, hazardous products, empty spaces and a sense of ending, activating an imaginary elimination, becoming a subject to practices of disposal, recuperation and revaluation.

This radical negation of the past was meant to give birth to a new order, hence it appeared a necessary 'sacrifice' (Bataille 1989; Reinert 2015). Legacies from the Soviet world became waste, yet retained the potential for redemption (through generational or political change). As my own research shows (Martínez 2017b), the material inheritance from the Soviet world decays at a different tempo than the evolution of values within Estonian society; this quality and generational change provide another chance to these legacies – the distinct duration of these remnants allows us to work on reconciliation,

rememberance and cross-generational dialogue through practices of repair and curation. Decisions to abandon or rehabilitate are always informed by value judgements, not simply by the cost of time, money or effort required. Hence the importance of practices of maintenance and commitment, and the corresponding need to complement the anthropological analysis of discard with repair studies. This practice helps one to overcome the negative logic that carries the abandonment of things and people, recalibrating synchronicity and a sense of commonality. Repair has consequences for how we think of social relations as a form of redistribution of the sensible (Rancière 2006), by lending continuity to discontinuity and demonstrating care and recognition (Alexander 2012), and reconnecting personal biographies to public and private materiality (Martínez forthcoming). We can situate repair as part of the everyday micro-powers, those that contribute to create transcendental narratives of reconstitution after wrongdoing or abandonment.

In their article, Thompson and Beck reject any possible 'elegant solution'. And here I reply by putting one forward: repair, in the form of ecologies of care, continuous maintenance and ordinary ethics, which challenge the actual economic reasoning of accelerated cycles of production–consumption–disposal and rapid financial profit. They reveal that brokenness is never final, indifferent, autonomous, impervious to change. Rather, it is an in-between condition, waiting for a new life, available for new relationships and reconstitutions (Laviolette 2006), demanding a more intimate engagement with material and wasting practices (Hawkins 2006). Eriksen himself makes clear in the section's introduction that one of the core points of the anthropological study of waste is to account for the tensions between disposable and recoverable: waste 'must be seen simultaneously as a material reality with implications for inequality, health, global "overheating" and the environmental contradictions of global capitalism; and as an indispensable element in a symbolic grammar of order and chaos, exclusion and inclusion'. These are fine words to return to.

Francisco Martínez

School of Arts, Design and Architecture

Aalto University

Helsinki

Finland

francisco.martinez@aalto.com