Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the ruins, rubble, and residues found around Uruguay's largest landfill. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research with waste pickers and managers, it analyses three discarded materials whose affordances have given rise to particular socio-material practices and futures.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the various ruins, rubble, and residues that are found around the perimeter of Montevideo's Felipe Cardoso landfill, the largest in Uruguay. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research with waste pickers and managers, it analyses three different discarded materials encountered around the landfill whose affordances have given rise to particular socio-material practices and futures.

The first material concerned is lead, a remainder of heavy metal dumping that was found in the earth of the 'pig town' shantytown and in the bodies of its children, leading, in the midst of a broader scandal of industrial lead poisoning in Montevideo, to the relocation of residents. The second material consist of potatoes, a remnant of agricultural dumping whose plants have become entangled with plastics, but which are still selectively harvested by local residents. The third set of material remains consists of the ruins of a composting plant, never fully operational, which has since housed various forms of waste and waste labour.

By focusing on different lively discards concentrated in a single site, the paper demonstrates how material remains and their infrastructures offer not only archaeological clues to the past, but also shape the future in indeterminate and unpredictable ways, generating instances of social change, conflict, and new forms of life. Anthropological research and oral histories are shown to be necessary to allow the unearthing of both 'past futures' and radical engagements with residues in the present.

Paper short abstract:

Ny-Ålesund's arctic landscape is rich in legacy pollutants released from melting mining debris. Observations of toxicologists' research on pollutants' effects on birds invite reflection on the temporal framings of ecological fieldwork and the intertwining of heritage matter and future-making.

Paper long abstract:

An anthropologist, assisting an ecotoxicologist, looks for birds in the debris of the world's northernmost coalmine, Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. Searching for movement or birdsong in a motionless landscape, his eye wanders across acres of mud, broken timber and steel, rails, wires and tubing, even clothes and domestic items. The earth has been torn, first by deep mining, then by the last workers' efforts at erasure, after a catastrophic accident and the mine's closure. Black earth, soaked by melting snow, rainbows of oil seepage - a John Martin painting after the fires burned out. The heritage of industrial violence is framed by older-than-human landscapes: bare glacial moraines and the mountaintops that, during earlier times of brutal exploitation, gave the archipelago its name, Spitzbergen. Landscape forms evoke the coal's geological origins, while the retreating glacier fronts reveal the long-term effects of its human use. The anthropologist-as-bird-watcher seeks movement on a different scale: a female snow bunting landing on the nest, a male calling out. The white birds find shelter in the debris; their eggs accumulate the legacy of pollutants released by the mine's decay and melting permafrost. The birds demonstrate the toxicants' effects on behavior and reproduction, genomes and future individual and population development, and can serve as sentinel, guiding future regulation. Studying the buntings ties industrial heritage and its distant prehistories to emerging futures - altered physiologies and ecologies, and attempts at prediction, modelling and regulation.

Paper short abstract:

Consumer electronics are designed to be irreparable and ephemeral, even as they become increasingly ubiquitous. Repair practices constitute resistance to their prescribed horizons and the dictate of use, loss, disposal and replacement inherent in their logic and design.

Paper long abstract:

Small consumer electronics are increasing ubiquitous in human lives. Manufactured to be consumed, disposed of and replaced, these devices have prescribed material and temporal horizons, often designed as impermeable, near-irreparable and to become defunct after a certain amount of time. Their latent potentialities are thus sealed off, rendered inaccessible by design, by technical as well as legal means - they are meant to be closed, ephemeral, to eventually stop working, to become (e-)waste, part of a technofossil record, a persistent chemical heritage, or drawn into circular economy schemes as recyclable, re-commodifiable material. Practices of repair constitute resistance to their prescribed horizons, their impermeability and the foreclosure of their latent potentials. Repairers work against technical and legal specifications to release devices' residual potentials and make their value available once again - not to the corporations that market them, but to their users and to other economies, a subversion of surplus value. Repair is also resistance to the way that these objects and their logic entail loss; the loss of a kind of material relationship, however mundane, that is nonetheless somehow constitutive, and of which one is robbed when objects become or are made into rubbish. Repair practitioners act within vastly diverse contexts, horizons of possibility, economic and political realities, yet nevertheless share very specific, technical struggles against insidious hardware and software tactics that aim to curtail objects' lifespans.

Paper short abstract:

Ethics of radioactive waste management require this generation to control that waste in perpetuity without risk or responsibility for future generations. Other dangerous residues from previous generations continue to resurface, often reconceived as heritage. Here I explore this divergence.

Paper long abstract:

There are always things we don't want; things we never wanted, but can't get rid of. The abject, the contaminated, the dangerous residues. We create management systems, infrastructure, to contain these residues, and residues elude them. In the mid 20th century, when we began experimenting with the powers of radioactive materials, there was little thought given to their persistence. Over the following decades, as publics became more aware of the danger, new categories of waste were defined: toxic waste, radioactive waste. The dominant model for the future management of these residues is now called 'the Swedish Model', though no repository has yet been completed or even begun construction in Sweden. The ethical underpinning of the Swedish Model requires that this generation should bear the entire burden of managing radioactive waste. Future generations should have no responsibility and no risk should be passed forward. This position of extreme temporal control reflects the extreme sense of danger associated with these abject materials. In this paper I will examine how other abject materials persist and resurface in human systems to become heritage; and consider the management regimes designed to contain dynamic material as an attempt to create both spatial and temporal purity.

Paper short abstract:

Archival research (and more generally the historiographic operation) is always a risky confrontation to the latent, even toxic, potentials of archives - and of other traces of the past. How do historians of epidemics - whether they literally exhume bodies or not - negotiate this risk?

Paper long abstract:

"Archives . . . constitute a type of sepulchre," wrote Achille Mbembe, an apparatus aiming to "ensure that the dead do not stir up disorder in the present". Following this perspective, archival research (and more generally the historiographic operation) is always a risky confrontation to the latent, disorder-stirring, even toxic, potentials of archives - and of other traces of the past.

To discuss this further, we will present a recent ethnographic research on the traces of a global health intervention in a remote region of the Cameroon-Congo borderland. In 1997-1998 an epidemic of severe illness was signalled in the small town of Ngoyla, killing close to 100 people. Red alert: the epidemic was locally called "Ebola", while the closest doctor (and derelict hospital) was more that a day of motorbike away. An international rescue mission was organized, which led to the elucidation of the cause of the epidemic, to the distribution of efficient antibiotics, and to a series of publication in high-impact factor journals. Our ethnography was an assessment and a parody of this global health success story. Returning on the site of the epidemic 20 years later, and tracking through Cameroon and France all of the actors of the rescue mission, we risked stirring up disorders and waking up a toxic past. Our paper will discuss how historians of epidemics - whether they literally exhume bodies or not - are exposed to this; their work inevitably oscillating between a profanation and a "safe burial" of the past.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the latent potentialities of agrochemicals in Bangladesh - introduced through development projects. It examines how emic concepts of 'shakti' [life force, strength] and 'bhejal' [impure, adulterated] food to illustrate the unpredictability of agrochemical traces.

Paper long abstract:

High-yielding rice was introduced to coastal Bangladesh in the 1980s via imported seeds, pesticides and synthetic fertilisers with the latent potential of greater yields and prosperity. This paper highlights how these materials - promoted through development aid projects - reshaped the deltaic waterscape through several unpredictable effects on the soil, food and human health. Bangladesh suffers from a long history of weak enforcement of existing regulations, where banned agrochemicals are regularly dumped on its soil - from toxic fertilisers to carcinogenic pesticides such as DDT and Endrin- along with counterfeits of well-known pesticide brands. Harmful pesticide residues contaminate food bought at the market, while heavy metal contaminants in fertilisers has resulted in half of Dhaka's rice containing lead. People are eating market-bought foods from that are essentially toxic. Food contaminated with agrochemicals or other substances is popularly described as bhejal [impure, adulterated] and ultimately unsafe; people who eat bhejal foods become bhejal people suffering from ill-health and health conditions (stroke, cancer, liver/kidney problems). Furthermore, the synthetic fertilisers used to grow the food are perceived to lack shakti [strength, power, life force] and reduce soil fertility. With less shakti in food and ultimately less shakti in humans, making them weak and prone to illness. The paper will build on the local understandings of shakti and bhejal to explore the materiality of agrochemicals and the ways in which they in different forms (as agricultural input, runoff, waste, residues, contaminants) affect both landscapes and bodies.

Paper short abstract:

Five hundred years of colonization in the New World have eradicated many North American Native American communities and left others in extreme states of ruin. Today, the surviving Native American communities are reconfiguring colonial salvage materials into emergent cosmologies of survival.

Paper long abstract:

The first convulsion of the Sixth Extinction began on October 12, 1492. Extensive species extinctions were triggered as the Americas were reconfigured by colonial/settler cultures, economies, and beliefs. Indigenous landscapes became alien landscapes as invasive species triggered New World species extinctions, intensive resource extractions transformed landscapes, and European agricultural practices reconfigured ecosystems. These material transformations were accompanied by alien/colonial perspectives toward native lands, indigenous peoples, and their worlds. Together, these material and ideational alienations de-substantiated and dis-integrated Native American worlds resulting in language and cultural extinctions, catastrophic population collapse, and religious and spiritual dissolution. After five hundred years of devastation in the Americas, Indigenous communities are reconfiguring the material artifacts of colonial salvage projects to repatriate Native American materials and ideational cultures.

This paper traces some Native American emergent vitalities arising out of the ruins of colonization through material remains such texts, museum collections, and ethnobotanical specimens. The latent potentialities of colonial artifacts are leading to new configurations of vitality for Native American communities. These survival strategies are also restructuring both indigenous and nonindigenous knowledge systems. Examples include the recovery of heritage seeds to re-indigenize diets, using historical documents to awaken sleeping languages, dismantling dams to revitalize rivers by restoring fish migrations. Taken together, these developments reveal a New World vision of adaptation, sustainability, and imagination that can guide us all toward meeting the challenges of anthropogenic toxicities and its concomitant stealth-suicidal tendencies.

Paper short abstract:

In the face of environmental uncertainties, plant genetic resources animate alternative visions of the future. From the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to the dandelion dreams of Thomas Heatherwick's seed cathedral, the latent possibilities of seed are woven through Anthropocene imaginaries.

Paper long abstract:

The future of agriculture is increasingly uncertain, as global climate change alters, for example, historical temperature and precipitation patterns and incidence of extreme weather events. Human security will be shaped by how we frame understandings and ethical commitments we articulate in response to unfolding impacts. Plant genetic resources are increasingly important in our global dreamings of survival. Modernist discourses about agricultural sustainability in the Anthropocene value collections of heritage seeds as libraries of genetic traits with the potential to empower ongoing adaptation to climate change and end world hunger through scientific crop breeding. Social movements instead revere heritage seeds for their capacity to root particular human communities in place and history. They have protested artificial transformations of seed and plant fertility in GMOs as processes that dispossess farmers of cultural and economic resources for sustainable livelihoods. Different visions thus depict seeds both as source materials for a new modernity and as enabling traditional cultural survival. These contested visions come together in seed banks, which act as boundary objects precisely because the future ecologies to which these seeds will give life are inherently unknown, conditioned as they must be by as-yet unforeseeable developments in technology, society and nature. From the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to the dandelion dreams of Thomas Heatherwick's seed cathedral, the latent possibilities of seed are woven throughout global imaginaries of the Anthropocene. This paper examines research on global collaborations in seed banking to reflect on emergent narratives about the past, present and future of human agriculture.

Paper short abstract:

This paper asks, what if the role of the anthropologist of toxic traces is not to document the protracted tragedy of toxicant harm or the farce of traditional techniques of detoxification but to highlight and accentuate the traces of radically different futures, latent in the everyday.

Paper long abstract:

The traditional means of detoxifying the environment largely rest on the assumption that substantive environmental change can only happen by pinpointing the sources of toxicity and stamping them out. In other words, the future we want is the present minus its insidious residues. From science and activism to legislation and innovation, subtracting or substituting these unwanted elements while also maintaining the status quo has proven to be an illusory task. This paper asks, what if the role of the anthropologist of toxic traces is not to document the protracted tragedy of toxicant harm or the farce of traditional techniques of detoxification but to highlight and accentuate the traces of radically different futures, latent in the everyday. This work draws upon a collaboration with an artist, Tomas Saraceno, in a project that attempts to make solar balloon travel a viable means of mid- and long-range transit. The wind and sun are the critical infrastructures for this carbon-free means of transportation and demands the ethos of engineering pivot from overcoming the environment to calculatedly submitting to it. Rather than approaching the issue of environmental detoxification through the traces by which late industrial capitalism knows itself (i.e. chemistry), this paper urges anthropological visions that render the status quo obsolete in addition to those directly contesting it, which will likely never render a substantially different future.