‘It's Only Us, Hyenas, Who Profit Out of It’: Wrecked Cars, Leaked Humans, and the Death of the Person-car

Mašek, Pavel

doi:10.1177/13591835211055709

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

References 44 publications

(59 reference statements)

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“…The strangeness of Vrch reminds everybody that some things and processes should be kept aside to keep the world meaningful. This categorical avoidance, nonetheless, creates interesting economic opportunities for informality at different hierarchical levels ranging from top managers to workers at the bottom (Mašek 2020). As Ledeneva puts it 'They are [that is informal practices] often invisible, resist articulation and measurement, and hide behind paradoxes, unwritten rules and open secrets ' (2018, 7).…”

Section: Earthwork Of Forgettingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Magnetism of strangeness: Silenced histories of landscapes

Sosna

2021

History and Anthropology

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Why do certain parts of landscape become places for waste disposal? This simple question seems to be easy to answer given the existence of sophisticated tools for formal modelling of a range of environmental, economic, social, and political variables which are supposed to minimize risk, cost, and disequity. There are, however, more subtle factors that shape waste disposal and its inscription in landscape. Using examples of two Czech landfills and drawing upon my ethnographic research of wastescapes, I examine how history, economic interests, social practices, events, material indeterminacies, and multispecies encounters took part in the transformation of these places into loci of 'strangeness'. Using a metaphor of magnetism I refocus our attention to a capacity of strange entities such as garbage, rubble, military waste, dead bodies, animal farms, and shooting ranges to attract each other along a spatiotemporal continuum. I argue that strangeness sticks to places and tends to perpetuate itself through a series of 'magnetic' relations over time. This magnetism stems from the human propensity to classify and dispose of entities whose open-endedness is dangerous and must be controlled through placement. While this process of placement is often imagined as a management of absence, I point to a dialectical relationship to the opposite category of presence as a critical source of magnetism. Waste management, then, becomes envisioned as part of a more general social process that keeps the world meaningful.

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Section: Earthwork Of Forgettingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…12. Humans and things might even become a single social being facing its death as a whole (see Mašek 2020).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%