Paper short abstract:

The paper examines recycling as an arena for enacting ethics among environmental activists in Western Siberia. Through a discussion of the concept "prefigurative politics", the paper provokes questions about the kind of practices we, as ethnographers, identify as having transformative potential.

Paper long abstract:

Based on fieldwork with environmental activists in Western Siberia, my paper studies recycling as an arena for enacting ethics. I suggest that in their accounts of recycling, my interlocutors formulated what could be called "an ethics of starting from small" - a future oriented ethics directed to gradual transformation of the society. I argue that the "ethics of starting from small" not only helps us to move beyond the idea of a cynical subjects in authoritarian contexts such as Russia (Pomerantsev 2019) but is also an important addition to anthropological accounts of "political possibilities" (Rethmann 2013). Instead of viewing my interlocutors focus on recycling as tokenism or internalization of neoliberal logic, I suggest that it shares much with anthropological accounts of prefiguration or prefigurative politics (Graeber 2009, Maeckelbergh 2009&2011, Razsa 2015) - a concept, which has usually been applied to political and social movements that could be described as radical and progressive. Exploring the concept of prefiguration in an ethnographic context and in relation to a practice it usually hasn't been applied to, the goal of the paper is to provoke questions about the kind of practices we, as ethnographers, identify as having transformative potential.