Social Anthropology

The anthropologist as jester, anthropology as jest?

In Cantanhez National Park in Guinea‐Bissau the construction of meaning made after encounters with chimpanzees is associated with local social life. If a chimpanzee makes an unprovoked attack on a person, its actions are often understood as those of a sorcerer. Chimpanzees are involved in two parallel accusation discourses: one is played in intimate spheres of sociability where sorcerers harm their kin to benefit from secret alliances, and the other addresses a wider audience perceived to benefit from chimpanzees which are being protected at the expense of other humans. Both narratives represent local criticism against transgressions to calculations of redistribution and reciprocity.

Cities have long been recognised as key spaces for neoliberal interventions. Identified by municipal leaders as instruments in competition for internationally mobile labour and capital, cities like Edinburgh, Scotland, have increasingly been shaped by urban development practices justified by the exigencies of competition. Any project to centralise urban development processes, however, must navigate the potential obstacles to efficiency found in the discipline of urban planning, which privileges community involvement in such processes. This article explores the tension between the values of community and efficiency in urban development, showing how, in the case of a proposal for development named Caltongate, the role of a community in the planning process was disputed, precisely because of its potential, qua community, to levy moralised claims to representation. I suggest that this case is not exceptional. Rather, it illustrates a characteristic contradiction of community as a politicised identity in neoliberal urban development: it is elevated in (often moralised) rhetoric but in practice is subordinated to the objective of efficiency in the delivery of centrally determined development outcomes.

This paper analyses local responses to forced migration in Hungary. Based on multi‐sited fieldwork in 2015, it explores how the populist radical right reinforced the boundaries of the nation in relation to migrants from Muslim majority lands in transit to other European destinations. Following the theoretical lines of Zygmunt Bauman and Mary Douglas, it argues that the ‘polluting migrant’ served to reinforce the ethno‐nationalist boundaries of Hungarian‐ness as propagated by Fidesz and Jobbik, strengthening the image of Hungary as the righteous protector of Christian European civilisation. The anti‐immigration campaigns propagated by the radical right ascribed an ontological status of ‘waste’ to the migrants, serving to legitimise their criminalisation and exclusion from national territory. An Islamophobic layer emerged in the radical right's grammar of exclusion that traditionally has targeted the country's Roma minority and Jews. At the same time, concerned Hungarians contested racialised securitisation and suspicion, re‐inscribing bios to migrants deemed as ‘human waste’ by the state. The contradictory interpretations of migrants as waste or value, burden or benefit, parallel struggles over statehood and identity in globalised Hungary – between a society open to diversification processes and one that closes its borders to difference, on a sliding path towards an illiberal state.

This paper attempts to show that while the production of waste may be universal, the threat it poses is not. In order to explain and justify the question ‘what type of problem is waste’, the paper begins by attempting to, first, provincialise the ‘environmental’ framing of waste by examining the category's historically changing problematisations in Western Europe and North America, and, second, through a critique of Mary Douglas's work , to argue that waste should be theorised ethnographically rather than analytically. It then argues that, in Egypt, the materiality of litter and the sociality of waste work are sublimated into a religio‐civilisational register based on the central trope of cleanliness rather than environment. It does so by considering various meanings and inflexions of the word ‘cleanliness’ in vernacular usage, the way the terms environment and pollution are used, naming conventions for waste collectors and anti‐litter campaigns.

The anthropology of waste, drawing on Mary Douglas’s seminal work as well as later studies of landfills, ragpickers, environmental crises and even social exclusion, is a prism through which to view and understand the crises of neoliberal globalisation. This introduction reviews the literature and identifies some themes in the anthropology of waste, some of which are explored in the subsequent contributions to this special section.

There is, it is often observed, no waste in nature; waste comes from culture. This means that if there were no human‐generated material flows – water, energy, phosphorus, nitrogen, food, carbon dioxide and so on – there would be no waste. But it does not follow from this that the more human‐generated flows there are, the more waste there will be. By re‐engineering our cities’ infrastructures in ways that enjoy the consent of their citizens – our focus in this paper is on water and its conversion into wastewater – we can progressively alter the material flows from ‘bad’ to ‘good’, with the ultimate goal of making those cities into forces for good in the environment.

The great anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that dirt is never an isolated event but belongs to a system. But rather than being the by‐product of a systematic ordering, I argue that dirt is one of the places where urban assemblages and lives, of an improvised and ad hoc kind, are rigged together. Not matter out of place then, but matter making place. This paper explores the analytic potential of trash as a lens onto city‐making and concludes that it is one of the mechanisms generating the distanciated and hyperlocal social textures of urban social morphology. Picking through the social morphologies of trash on the Koshe Landfill site on the fringes of Addis Ababa, I trace some of its local and translocal social textures.

Hastrup, Kirsten and Frida Hastrup (eds.) 2015. Waterworlds: anthropology in fluid environments. New York: Berghahn Books. Hb.: $110. ISBN: 978‐1‐78238‐946‐0.