The Waste Commons in an Emerging Resource Recovery Waste Regime: Contesting Property and Value in Melbourne's Hard Rubbish Collections

Practices of scavenging of Melbourne's hard rubbish collections are examined in the context of an emerging resource recovery waste regime linked with policy shifts that promote resource recovery over disposal through landfill. Waste regimes have many parallels with regimes in natural resource management and contestations over property are an important but neglected aspect. Based on research conducted primarily in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne, I argue that hard rubbish on the kerb‐side forms an informal ‘waste commons’ that facilitates various forms of revaluing of municipal household waste. Results of a survey conducted by householders scavenging of their own hard rubbish piles suggest that informal scavenging activities were more effective for diverting waste from landfill by recycling than the formal processes of council hard rubbish contractors. Interviews conducted with residents, waste management contractors and self identified ‘professional’ scavengers revealed different perspectives on the waste commons and highlighted the contested nature of property in hard rubbish. Together with the survey findings, they allow tentative conclusions to be drawn about the role of the waste commons in the transition from a regime of disposal through landfill to one focused on resource recovery.     

Fashioned Forest Pasts,Occluded Histories? International Environmental Analysis in West African Locales

This article considers how environmental problematics are produced and interpreted, using case material from West Africa’s humid forest zone. Examing the experiences of several countries over the long term, it is possible to identify a deforestation discourse produced through national and international institutions. This represents forest and social history in particular ways that structure forest conservation but which obscure the experience and knowledge of resource users. Using fine‐grained ethnography to explore how such discourse is experienced and interpreted in a particular locale, the article uncovers problems with ‘discourse’ perspectives which produce analytical dichotomies which confront state and villager, and scientific and ‘local’ knowledges. The authors explore the day‐to‐day encounters between villagers and administrators, and the social and historical experiences which condition these. Instances where the deforestation discourse becomes juxtaposed with villagers’ alternative ideas about landscape history prove relatively few and insignificant, while the powerful material effects of the discourse tend to be interpreted locally within other frames. These findings present departures from the ways relations between citizen sciences and expert institutions have been conceived in recent work on the sociology of science and public policy.     

An Uncomfortable Responsibility: Ethics and Nuclear Waste

This article discusses the ethics of nuclear waste management in terms of the concept of responsibility for the harmful effects of modern technology. At present, the principle that every country and new generation should assume responsibility for the nuclear waste they produce is challenged by a globalised industry and the repositories of nuclear waste that have accumulated over the past fifty years and been left for future generations to manage. The basic premise of the article is that modern technology, particularly nuclear power, calls for a new kind of responsibility that extends to future generations as well. This new concept of responsibility and the principles of long-term management of nuclear waste are set out and discussed in detail, with reference to Kant, Jaspers, Jonas, Peter Kemp and others.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 33, Number 3. June 2017

Front and back cover caption, volume 33 issue 3 Front cover Donald J. Trump being sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, 20 January 2017. The wealthiest and the oldest US president, Trump has also proved to be the most divisive, picking controversial cabinet members, many of whom, like him, are millionaires or billionaires with no experience of working in the public sector. During early 2017, white nationalists became emboldened by his xenophobic rhetoric. In this issue, four authors pick up on select dimensions marking the Trump presidency, including: post‐truth, the trickster phenomenon, the role of big data in the US elections and Trump's pet project, namely the border wall between Mexico and the US. To what extent is Trump's rise to power indicative of global trends? In what ways have the shortcomings of neoliberalism accelerated these processes? How can anthropologists best position themselves within national environments where authoritarian, misogynistic and xenophobic tendencies are on the rise? Back cover: FOOD WASTE There are increasing levels of food poverty in the UK and ever‐growing numbers of food banks which have become symbolic of the state of the nation. At the same time, there is also rising public concern about food waste or surplus. Although the largest proportion is produced in the home, consumers tend to blame supermarkets, often utilizing a discourse of environmentalism. Such concern has resulted in a number of high‐profile campaigns like the one shown here ‘Love Food, Hate Waste’ by WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme) – which is only one of a number targeting both the food industry and consumers. Recently, it has also been suggested that such surplus food should be given to the growing numbers of people in food poverty through charities which supply food to their clients, including (but not only) food banks. The recent introduction of the Food Cloud app in a partnership between FareShare and Tesco has facilitated such a process. Indeed, it is often contended that this is a win‐win situation which neatly solves both problems – too much food being produced and left unsold, and too many people who cannot afford to buy food. In this issue, Pat Caplan points to some of the problems in this apparently tidy solution, drawing on two case studies from her recent research. While those in food poverty receive donated food from the public via food banks or surplus food from companies, they recognize that the acceptance of such food, no matter how good its quality, is stigmatizing – left‐over food for left‐over people. On the other hand, the food industry benefits not only from the additional food purchased by consumers to donate to food banks, but also from the PR which accrues from donating its own surplus to charity. So the win‐win situation does not in the long term solve either the problem of production of surplus or the problem of poverty.     

Humanitarian reframing of nuclear weapons and the logic of a ban

The achievement of past international treaties prohibiting anti‐personnel mines and cluster munitions showed that unpropitious political situations for dealing with the effects of problematic weapons could be transformed into concrete, legally binding actions through humanitarian‐inspired initiatives. Although there is now renewed concern about the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, some policy makers dispute the relevance of these past processes. This article examines how and why cluster munitions became widely reframed as unacceptable weapons, and the nature and significance of functional similarities with contemporary efforts of civil society activists to instigate humanitarian reframing of nuclear weapons and promote the logic of a ban treaty in view of its norm‐setting value among states. In the case of cluster munitions, the weapon in question was signified as unacceptable in moral and humanitarian law terms because of its pattern of harm to civilians with reference to demonstrable evidence of the consequences of use. Ideational reframing was instigated by civil society actors, and introduced doubts into the minds of some policy‐makers about weapons they had previously considered as unproblematic. This is relevant to the current discourse on managing and eliminating nuclear weapons in the Nuclear Non‐Proliferation Treaty, in which there is dissonance between the rhetoric of those states claiming to be responsible humanitarian powers and their continued dependence on nuclear weapons despite questions about the utility or acceptability of these arms.     

The banality of displacement: Discourse and thoughtlessness in the internal refugee crisis in Colombia

Colombia has one of the largest internal refugee populations in the world. For years government agencies and NGOs presented vastly disparate statistics, with government figures showing much lower estimates of the amount of internally displaced persons, or IDPs. In this article I suggest that the discourse of displacement in Colombia was dominated by a “war over numbers” at the expense of a more complex characterization of the displaced population. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's suggestive ideas on the banality of evil, I propose the notion of the “banality of displacement” to examine two distinct but related processes. First, the normalization of violence over time has made forced displacement appear as a mundane social fact in Colombia. Second, this banality is actively produced through an “attitudinal thoughtlessness” in government and NGO circles. To illustrate this banality at play, I focus on two interrelated aspects. First, I examine the history of IDP management in Colombia, in particular the disputes over displacement statistics. Second, I explore the “colour-blindness” in the counting strategies and the lack of reliable data regarding displaced Afro-Colombians. In a final section I discuss ways in which the banality of displacement has been contested, both from civil society and by the Constitutional Court, which has challenged the Colombian government over its handling of the displacement crisis. I also suggest more broadly how a re-reading of Arendt brings a critical sensibility to other geopolitical contexts, exemplified by geographers' engagement with the “war on terror.”     

The Discourse of Fear: Effects of the War on Terror on Canadian University Students

This multimethod study is based on written narratives, demographic questionnaires, and interviews. I examine data collected from 99 students of a Canadian university to explore how the War on Terror has affected them. The findings are divided into four categories. The first category of the respondents is mute about the war’s effects. The second shows a disjuncture between the respondents’ lives and the war. The third reflects the effects on the Canadian soldiers’ friends or relatives, and the final represents those who do not have personal connections to the war but feel deeply affected by it. The discourse of fear appears as the most prominent effect in the narratives of the respondents. The basic themes that emerged from the discourse of fear (racism, Islamophobia, and social control) are then developed and discussed as they pertain to the respondents. The findings have many implications for both researchers and educators.     

Regimes of Ethical Value? Landscape,Race and Representation in the Canadian Diamond Industry

Abstract: Canadian diamonds are marketed as “ethical” alternatives to notorious “blood diamonds”. This paper analyzes the specific matrices through which ethical consumption as a discourse is being mobilized to sell diamonds. I argue that consumption operates as a system of social signification in which consuming subjects are positioned as moral subjects. Moreover, I argue that historically accumulated symbolic power, in the form of imagined geographies of benevolent colonialism in the Canadian North versus the exploitation of “dark” Africa, pristine, “white” northern landscapes, modernization via commodity production, and national identity, creates the very field of meaning within which the consuming subject is positioned. The ethicalization of Canadian diamonds also has important normative implications both in terms of the cultural politics of ethical consumption and social and environmental justice in the Canadian North.     

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ISSUES IN SITING A NUCLEAR-FUEL WASTE DISPOSAL FACILITY IN ONTARIO, CANADA

An environmental assessment of the Canadian Nuclear Fuel Waste Disposal Concept was initiated in 1989. The primary purpose of the assessment is to determine the technical feasibility of burying nuclear-fuel waste deep into the Canadian Shield. If deemed acceptable, a second phase of facility siting will commence. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the social and political dimensions of nuclear-fuel waste management in Canada. It is contended that nuclear-fuel waste management transcends technical concerns, and that the ultimate success or failure of siting procedures is hinged on social and political acceptability. Data focusing on various facets of a nuclear-fuel waste disposal facility were collected from a sample of residents from three northern Ontario communities. Results demonstrate that there is a strong relationship between facility acceptability, risk perception, and distance from community. On the basis of these findings, it is contended that a regional siting approach needs to be developed and implemented to ensure that concerns over the viability of nuclear power, equity, and trust are incorporated and granted legitimacy in the management of nuclear-fuel waste. Une évaluation environnementale du concept d'élimination des déchets de combustible nucléaire au Canada a débuté en 1989. L'idée première de cette évaluation est de déterminer la faisabilité d'enfouir les déchets de combustible nucléaire dans le Bouclier canadien. Si l'on estime que c'est possible, une deuxième phase dans le choix d'un emplacement d'enfouissement débutera. Le but de cet exposé est d'évaluer les dimensions sociale et politique qu'entraînent la gestion des déchets de combustible nucléaire au Canada. On dit que la gestion des déchets de combustible nucléaire va au-delà des préoccupations techniques et que le succès ou l'échec des procédures de choix d'emplacement dépendent aussi de l'acceptabilité sociale et politique. Les données portant sur différentes facettes d'élimination des déchets de combustible nucléaire ont été recueillies auprès de résidents sélectionnés dans trois communautés du nord de l'Ontario. Les résultats ont montré qu'il existait un lien très fort entre l'acceptabilité des installations, la perception de risque qu'elles entraînaient et la distance qui les en séparait de la communauté. Sur la base de ces constatations, on a avancé, quant au choix d'un emplacement, qu'il fallait envisager une approche sur le plan régional pour assurer qu'en matière de gestion des déchets de combustible nucléaire, on reconnaisse de manière légitime les préoccupations touchant à la viabilité de cette énergie.     

Managing the Discourse of Resource Management: the Case of Sasi from ‘Southeast’ Maluku,Indonesia

Co-management of protected areas and renewable resources, with its focus upon local community involvement, is often proposed as some form of ‘magic cure’ for environmental ailments and social injustices. Notwithstanding the inherent romanticism of some of the proponents of management from ‘the bottom up’, there is a strong tendency to view this approach in overly utilitarian, ahistorical and often essentialist terms. In the process, the cultural, historical and political specificities and effects of this discourse are either neutralised or totally disregarded. While a number of authors have identified some of the limitations and problems associated with the implementation of community-based, co-management programmes, there is still a general reluctance to question the logic which informs and is constitutive of this discourse. In this paper, I explore the discourse of resource management in relation to the varied practices and perceptions associated with and identified as sasi. This discussion of sasi focuses upon the island of Luang, and the 1800 or so people who inhabit this island located in the southern waters of the Banda sea. The environmental and economic circumstances of Luang make it an ideal context for the investigation of ‘community-based, marine resource management’ strategies. However, while this context seems to comply with some of the truths produced by the discourse of resource management, in this paper I argue that the very canons of this discourse are placed at risk through people's enactment of their own projects and the expression of their own representations.     

Desiring Sameness? The Rise of a Neoliberal Politics of Normalisation

Since the 1990s the dominant political discourse of social movements concerned with "sexual politics" has been that of seeking access into mainstream culture through demanding equal rights of citizenship. I focus on the changing politics of sexuality in the context of new forms of social governance associated with neoliberalism, central to which is professionalisation and particular forms of knowledge production. Changes in political organising, coupled with the growth in identity‐based consumption and the greater visibility of lesbians and gay men as consumer citizens, have provided a variety of opportunities for new professional careers. I discuss these developments and suggest that a key aspect of this increase in professionalisation is the construction of the gay and lesbian subject as part of a national and, in some instances, an international constituency. Finally, I consider how, in recent years, new forms of professionalisation of knowledge production about lesbians and gay men have emerged, not only in terms of political and market interests, but also in the academy.     

Waste and its masquerades: On the production of urban natures in Kochi,India

Waste management has been a focal point in ethnographic research, yet its aesthetic and ideological facets in shaping ‘urban nature’ have been largely overlooked. The article delves into a comparative study of two parks in Kochi, a South Indian city, examining the intersection of environmental aesthetics, infrastructural visibility, and the conceptualization of urban nature. Through this juxtaposition, the study elucidates how divergent waste management strategies reflect broader ideologies concerning urban environments and their role in urban development initiatives. The article posits that waste and its management are not peripheral elements in the urban experience of nature; rather, they are integral components that shape it.     

Labours of land: domesticity,wilderness and dispossession in the development of Canadian uranium markets

This article examines the role played by gendered constructions and categories in Canadian cold war appropriations of Aboriginal lands for nuclear production. Focusing primarily on the ways in which gendered tropes were mobilized by wives and companions of uranium workers recently arrived in the Serpent River watershed (home of the Serpent River Anishinabe) at the end of the first global uranium boom in which uranium production in the watershed was severely threatened, I explore how gendered constructions and categories provided important cartographies and reference points with which to order and maintain possession of the lands of the Serpent River watershed as a singular, Canadian, nuclear space. Drawing on Kaika's (2004) work on the discursive production of ‘home’, I argue that representations of the watershed as home in the wilderness and as imperilled domestic space, as well as the important ways in which they worked to secure discursive rights to space within the broader registers of white Canadian post war gender difference, relied on the near-complete erasure of Aboriginal presence and culture from the land for continuity. I conclude that while this erasure facilitated (morally and practically) the further incorporation of the watershed into Canadian geographies of nuclear production, it also worked to obscure the ways in which the industry and uranium economy were able to capitalize on Aboriginal lands, labour and their subordinate position in Canadian society.     

How to Further Develop the Nonproliferation Regime? West German Nuclear Exports to Brazil and Iran in Context of US Criticism

ABSTRACT

Nuclear exports were a crucial part of West Germany's nuclear industry. Its domestic market was too small to keep a big nuclear industry alive. But nuclear exports were subject to a nonproliferation regime which West Germany had accepted when signing the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). During the 1970s, there were major quarrels with the United States about West Germany's nuclear export policy and its approach to the nonproliferation regime. Using sources from several German archives, this article examines the nuclear export policy of West Germany and the patterns of justification as a further development of the nonproliferation regime. It is focused on two different cases, the nuclear export to Brazil and to Iran, which are strongly connected and both included sensitive technology such as reprocessing and enrichment.

The export cases touch on the issue of further development of the nonproliferation regime, the emerging nuclear world order and broader conflicts about the hegemonic and discriminatory structure of the NPT. The way West Germany handled US criticism of the exports shows West German willingness to shape its own foreign policy and the attempt to gain independence from US dominance, thus contributing to the decline of bipolarism and strengthening middle powers.     

Esquisses géographiques des récits cinématographiques Canadiens contemporains

Films carry an original geographic discourse. Beyond the vision of an author, they often reflect a society's perspective on territories. The goal of this research is to study the geographic discourse developed by Canadian cinema through an analysis of the places structuring Canadian cinematographic narratives. This analysis is based on the systematic study of a selection of 46 contemporary Canadian films. These films have been transformed into a database of 2200 places using an original geographic reading grid. Analysis of these places identifies the existence of territories under‐ and over‐represented by Canadian cinema, as well as territories of consensus and divergence that exist between different categories of Canadian cinema such as Quebecois, anglophone, and hybrid. Some interesting results include the general lack of interest in the southern hemisphere—notably Latin America—as well as in the Nordic territories (outside of First Nations cinema). It is also interesting to note the quasi‐absence of Vancouver on the screen, while Toronto and the United States appear recurrently. But the most striking result is probably the profound divergence in the way Canadian cinema treats the province of Quebec in general, and the city of Montreal in particular. Montreal is indeed the perfect example of a space of divergence: the city is heavily represented in Quebecois films, but completely ignored in the rest of Canadian cinematographic production. This deep opposition illustrates the importance of downtown Montreal as a symbolic space of Quebec national identity.     

Iron in the soil: Living with military waste in Bosnia‐Herzegovina

Waste, in particular the waste produced by conflicts, has become a serious matter of concern in recent scholarship on materiality and society. But what is military post‐conflict waste, and what kind of materiality does it entail? This article retrains an ethnographic focus on post‐conflict materiality away from visible and easily recognized entities such as politicized monuments, towards (in)visible and misrecognized war remnants, those parts buried in the soil, in trees and sometimes in people's bodies. The article focuses on people's quotidian practices of re‐creating, re‐relating to and re‐dwelling in the world in the presence of military waste in rural Bosnia. It calls for an inclusive scholarship of materiality that takes the material‐cum‐emotional affects and effects that these material objects discharge upon persons as a matter of serious concern. The themes discussed in the article have far‐reaching implications, not just for Bosnian postwar anthropology, but for critically engaged anthropology and the role of the discipline in the contemporary world.     

Impure and Worldly Geography:1 The Africanist Discourse of the Royal Geographical Society, 1831–73

The written networks through which knowledge is produced and circulated offer a focus for a theoretically informed critique of the formation of modern geographical knowledge. Drawing on deconstruction and colonial discourse theory, this paper presents a reading of the Royal Geographical Society's (RGS) published record of nineteenth-century African exploration. This discourse posits a racially unmarked subject-position as the condition of scientific discussion. The Society's geographical knowledge is shown to have been formed through the effacement of alternative subject-positions and the appropriation of other ways of knowing. It is suggested that closer attention to the discursive structures of written networks of knowledge might inform a more nuanced understanding of the reproduction of disciplined knowledge.     

‘We are not a rich country to waste our resources on expensive toys’: Mexico’s version of Atoms for Peace

Abstract

The Atoms for Peace initiative was announced by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 8 December 1953. The ways in which Eisenhower’s proposal was interpreted, adapted and reshaped by different countries allows us to understand the various meanings and uses of nuclear technologies, particularly in Third World countries. Mexico’s version of the initiative was related to its modernizing nationalism, a distaste for overt geopolitical alignment and nuclear weapons, and an intermittent commitment of the federal government with nuclear technologies. These ingredients eventually led to the promotion of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean, known as the Treaty of Tlatelolco (TT) signed in Mexico City in 1967. The TT made Latin America the first nuclear weapons-free populated region in the world, thus positioning Mexico in the new geopolitical nuclear order through a denuclearization discourse and a policy of non-engagement with nuclear technologies.     

The impossible object: Relics,property, and the secular in post‐Soviet Russia (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The article analyzes a recent court case concerning the relics of two 14th‐century Russian Orthodox saints, during which the Russian state ruled to confiscate the relics from the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church. I examine the church's attempts to fight back, paying particular attention to how the conflicting parties have differently framed the disputed objects' materiality. In doing so, I link the ongoing debates over whether dead bodies can be considered property and who owns the bodies of saints, to the current battles in Russia over the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. The relics affair, I suggest, ultimately points to the issue of how politics itself is constituted through the battles to define these boundaries, who claims the power to draw these lines, and why issues dealing with dead bodies possess a certain affective charge that causes political action. I argue that the case of the Suzdal relics makes visible certain aporias in both secular law and religious discourse, which ultimately make this case impossible for the state to resolve in its favour through conventional judicial means without overruling the law. In this process, the object of dispute itself disappears from the discursive space, becoming buried in a sort of ‘black box’, the interior contents of which are ultimately unnameable and uncategorizable.     

Images of Community: Discourse and Strategy in Property Relations

This article argues that divergent images of community result not from inadequate knowledge or confusion of purpose, but from the location of discourse and action in the context of specific struggles and dilemmas. It supports the view that ‘struggles over resources’ are also ‘struggles over meaning’. It demonstrates the ways in which contests over the distribution of property are articulated in terms of competing representations of community at a range of levels and sites. It suggests that, through the exercise of ‘practical political economy’, particular representations of community can be used strategically to strengthen the property claims of potentially disadvantaged groups. In the policy arena, advocates for ‘community based resource management’ have represented communities as sites of consensus and sustain-ability. Though idealized, such representations have provided a vocabulary with which to defend the rights of communities vis-à-vis states. Poor farmers, development planners, consultants and academics can also use representations of community strategically to achieve positive effects, or at least to mitigate negative ones. Most, but not all, of the illustrations in this article are drawn from Indonesia, with special reference to Central Sulawesi.