[csaa-forum] Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series #1: David Boarder Giles, Towards an Anthropology of Abject Economies

[Tim Neale]

Date: Thursday 2nd March
Time: 4:30-6:00pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122 (also: Burwood C2.05, VMP TBC)

Abstract:
Where do things go when they are lost, discarded, or forgotten? What social
afterlives do they lead? And perhaps more importantly, whose lives are
constituted among the detritus? Through an exploration of such questions,
and the larger patterns that emerge from them, I sketch out new directions
for an anthropology of value, one that looks beyond the horizons of capital
towards the futures that lie in its ruins. To that end, I ask what might
constitute an *abject economy*—an economy built precisely on the abjection
and abandonment of people, places, and things. What pathways of
devalorization and desuetude might be its conditions of possibility? What
emergent forms of life endure, for example, in the interstices of capital?
What non-market practices and regimes of value are possible within its
folds? I develop both a theoretical framework for future research, and an
ethnographic description from my own work with dumpster-divers, squatters,
and other scavengers in several “global” cities in North America. These
scavengers cultivate, in a very real sense, minor economies, putting into
circulation those surpluses—people, places, and things alike—discarded by
the prevailing markets and publics of these cities. They present us with
one model of an abject economy: non-market forms of surplus value and
labor, simultaneously made possible and necessary by the vicissitudes of
capital accumulation. These economies are paradoxes, neither separable
from, nor commensurable with the logic of market exchange. Such economies
hold profound lessons for the anthropology of the twenty-first century—in
which market-centric, “neoliberal” regimes of value seem to have eclipsed
so many other forms of economy. In a moment when there seems to
be no “outside” to capitalism, we may yet discover its margins, and there
may we not only learn a great deal about the ontological grounds of capital
itself, but also discover existing and emergent modes of valuing otherwise.
Giving an account of these dynamics and paradoxes, I will argue, will be
one of anthropology’s key challenges in the coming years.



Biography:
David Boarder Giles is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Deakin University in
Melbourne, Australia. He writes about cultural economies of waste and
homelessness, and the politics of urban food security and public space,
particularly in "global" cities. He has done extensive ethnographic
fieldwork in Seattle and other cities in the United States and Australasia
with dumpster divers, urban agriculturalists, grassroots activists,
homeless residents, and chapters of Food Not Bombs—a globalized movement of
grassroots soup kitchens.



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Timothy Neale

Research Fellow, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation

Deakin University
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