STRAND 3 : THE DESTRUCTION OF EXCESS: BURNING, BURIAL & DECAY, AND REINCARNATION
Haunting Strand 1 and Strand 2 is the destruction of things: in declaring things to be waste we make evaluative judgements about objects that have implications for their future, specifically for their continued existence as a recognisable something. To declare something waste then, is to position an item or items of material culture in conduits which effect particular material as well as cultural transformations: in becoming waste it is not just that material culture becomes the surplus that is excess but that it changes its physicality too. Wasting as a process is simultaneously material and cultural. Yet its effect as a process seemingly is to nullify the cultural. For wasting foregrounds physical transformations through its incorporation of materials within technologies of combustion and decay, be they controlled (incineration, anaerobic digestion or the burial that is landfill) or unbounded (dumping, tipping and abandonment). Social science’s classic response to technologies of waste management has invariably been a social and political one: to focus on the oppositional politics of protest, for example those orchestrated by local communities against proposed incineration sites or those of global NGO environmental campaigners. Although invaluable, this approach leaves the technologies of wasting unexamined, and the preserve of the engineering sciences.
We propose a material culture approach to this question. Whilst they all involve physical transformations, the different technologies of wasting are also productive of meaning. Research on the anthropology of human death has done much to enhance our understanding of the disposal rituals of burial and burning, and their relation to memorialization and remembering. But how these rituals relate to the social death of objects is less clear, particularly when choreographed and managed by the industrial scale infrastructure and technologies of the contemporary waste industry. In contrast, more is known about object abandonment. In this strand of the programme we focus on the technologies of the contemporary waste industry and its disposal rituals. We want to know what the mass burning and burial of economic excess means culturally and socially; what differences these rituals effect and what they have to tell us about the various options there are for managing ‘our waste’. We explore these questions through two projects which look at the technologies of landfill, incineration and anaerobic digestion respectively in a comparative European perspective, and through a study that connects the excess of consumption in the UK to India.
© The Waste of the World 2009
