Chapter 4

Anthrop olo gical

approac h e s to
contemp orary
materia l worl d s

Penny Harvey

4.1 Introduction: The Temporality of

Contemporary Material Worlds

Anthropological studies of human lifeworlds reveal the many ways in which human
beings struggle to harness or contain the vitality of materials, not just in their efforts to
make things, but also in their attempts to make things go away. Jane Bennett refers to the
quarantines of matter and life that encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the
lively powers of material formations (Bennett 2010: vii). But in recent times the modern
capacity to generate waste has also begun to generate concerns about the material future of
the planet, taking us rapidly back to an awareness of material lifeits shape, its potential,
and its limits.
Mary Douglass seminal discussion of the symbolic value of notions of cleanliness and dirt,
or matter out of place (Douglas 1966) has extended in more recent times to a preoccupation
with environmental pollution, the global circulation of discarded materials, and the disposal
of toxic waste (e.g. Fortun 2001; Redclift 1996; Rathje and Murphy 2001; Sawyer 2004; Fortun
and Fortun 2005; Hawkins 2005; Gregson et al. 2010; Reno, this volume). The negotiation
of value and divergent understandings of harm and of danger still feature in contemporary
analyses of these material relations. However, scholars of what has become known as the
new materialism (Coole and Frost 2010) pay particular attention to the vibrancy of matter,
to the temporal dimensions and the transformational potential of materials. The notion of
waste as the unwanted or unusable by-product of some other activity is, as Douglas taught
us, an effect of prior categorization. Such categorizations are destabilized by the diverse
modes of recycling through which waste matter is now routinely recovered, its value recon-
figured, and its future managed. Contemporary concerns over our planetary ecologies,

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 Anthropological approaches 55

combined with the impulse to solve the problem of widespread industrial pollution via tech-
nological means, have transformed understandings of waste futures, creating not only new
markets in waste products, but stimulating the production of new materials. At the core of
these concerns is an awareness of the vitality of matter. Indeed it is this vitality that renders
waste an issue of public concern, for so much of the waste of industrialized societies tends
to the toxic.
Archaeologists are no strangers to waste. Discarded materials are routinely recovered
and examined for what they can tell us of the world in which these things were once valued.
In the 1970s the path-breaking Garbage Project grew from an archaeological interest in
discarded things, and established the significance of garbage to the study of contempo-
rary human lifeworlds, revealing habits and patterns that were often reported differently in
interviews and surveys.1 More recently a research programme on the Waste of the World
extended these interests to anthropologists and geographers interested in the afterlife of
waste, its planetary circulations, its potential for recycling, and its toxic effects.2 However,
it is those materials that point beyond our known human worlds that interest me, as they
introduce a central concern in contemporary anthropology, namely how to address the pos-
sibility of a disturbing alterity or sense of ontological difference. I start with waste in order
to invoke material life that exceeds semiotic analysis. My argument works with the idea that
the disturbing qualities of such materials are somewhat glossed over in current research
(within both anthropology and archaeology) that follows Ingolds call to attend to materials
and to life processes rather than to objects per se (Ingold 2007b). While acknowledging the
significance that he rightly attributes to material life, I want to retain the sense of threat that
certain objects and materials generate. Moving by way of these threatening materials I seek
to recover the focus on affect that characterized previous writing on material agency and
which animates contemporary discussions of ontological politics.
Nowhere is this sense of the threatening vitality of matter more explicit than in those stud-
ies of the disposal and circulation of nuclear waste (Gusterson 1996; Petryna 2002; Masco
2006). Here we are facing the dilemma of how to contain matter with enduring toxicity. In a
remarkable documentary, Danish film-maker Michael Madsen (2010) explores the worlds
first permanent storage facility for nuclear waste that is being constructed in a place they call
Onkalo, in Finland.3 In the film, the engineers discuss the multiple temporalities of the mate-
rials with which they are engaged, particularly the contrasts between the relative instability of
events at the earths surface by comparison with the durable configuration of the granite deep
below which holds out the possibility of a secure medium for the storage of the nuclear waste.
Beyond this image of divergent temporalities or speeds of transformation, the film enthralls
through its evocation of a time-scale that exceeds the human imagination. It has taken one
hundred thousand years for our species to evolve; it will take another hundred thousand for
this toxic matter to decompose. Who we might have become, and what the waste material or
what our planet might have become by then, cannot be understood experientially.
This sense of matter out of time and the rescaling of the human shifts our sense of the
anthropological. Those working on climate change talk of the anthropocene (Chakrabarty

1
See <http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/GarbologyOnline/Home>.
2
See <http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/res-060-23-0007/read>.
3 I am grateful to Juan Salazar, University of Western Sydney, for introducing me to this film and

pointing out its significance for the study of material affect.

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 56 Penny Harvey

2009; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), the geological age in which human life came to defin-
itively shape planetary ecosystems. And yet the force and impact of our species on the
planet is hard to grasp, and harder to control for it involves beyond-human temporal scales.
The ways in which we imagine and relate to these beyond-human temporal dimensions is
nevertheless a space of the contemporary human imaginary, particularly in the mediated
world of scientific exploration and technological innovation (Rabinow 1996; Haraway 1997;
Franklin 2007; Helmreich 2009; Edgeworth, this volume). Indeed Madsen suggests that the
preoccupation with non-human scales, materials, and life-forms is perhaps defining of our
contemporary modern human imaginary.4
It is thus not so much that the vitality of matter is at issue, as that the boundaries of life
itself are tangibly extending in ways that challenge the modernist distinctions between mat-
ter and life that Bennett invokes. Indeed recent developments at the interface of chemistry,
materials science, and electronics have seen dramatic innovations in the design of new,
smart materials. Such materials are now routinely produced as technological artefacts with
sensory capacities, extending the possibilities of artificial life from the electronic engineer-
ing of environments, to a reconfiguration of materials themselves (Kuchler 2008; Kuchler
and Oakley 2013).

4.2 Living with Materials

Beyond current anthropological interests in technological innovations and the ways in which
the life sciences now include synthetic chemistry and informatics, we should acknowledge
that anthropologists and archaeologists have always engaged the liveliness of matter via the
preoccupations and interests of people who never assumed a world in which living beings
acted upon a passive material environment. The vibrancy of matter is hardly hot news in
either disciplinewhich have long held an interest in animate objects, in fetishes, and in the
relational dynamics between humans and the environments in which they live and move.
Mundane productive activities, such as farming, herding, hunting, fishing, and gathering
have always entailed a sophisticated ecological awareness, and always entangled the material,
the vital, and the spiritual in ways that appeared strange to modern ways of thinking. The
understanding of materials and artefacts as forming the very fabric of human life has been the
foundational assumption of studies of material culture, exemplified by the work of Miller (e.g.
1997, 2005, 2009) and his many collaborators.5 So too Appadurais (1988) specific interest in
the social life of things involved an exploration of how human lives are shaped by the move-
ments of commodities and the ever fluctuating and dynamic formation of value. Both these
broad approaches pay considerable attention to the political conditions and effects of object
movements, attending to how material artefacts mediate human relations to the world.
But some have argued that this focus on artefacts detracts attention from more significant
material relations. Ingold has called on anthropologists to take materials more seriously

4
See <http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/synopsis/>.
5
See Millers website for further detail: <http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/academic_
staff/d_miller>. See also the Journal of Material Culture: <http://intl-mcu.sagepub.com> and the
material world blog: <www.materialworldblog.com> for ongoing debate in this field.

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 Anthropological approaches 57

(2007a, 2007b, 2011). For Ingold materials are the stuff of life itself. He argues that human
lifeand thus human actionis intrinsically material in that it is embodied, and it is sus-
tained through immersion in a material world. Material relations are basic to how we live in
the world; they are the medium in and through which we live our lives. Key to this approach
is the understanding that materials are themselves instrinsically relational, dynamic open
structures that transform over time, with or without human intervention. This approach to
the dynamic movement of matter draws on Bergsonian understandings that life is not con-
tained in things, but manifest in movement: It is movement itself, wherein every organism
emerges as a peculiar disturbance that interrupts the linear flow, binding it into the forms
we see. So well does it feign immobility, however, that we are readily deceived into treating
each as a thing rather than as a process, forgetting that the very permanence of its form is
only the outline of a movement (Bergson 1911: 135).6
In developing his argument Ingold generates an explicit critique of studies of material
culture. His objections to this thriving subfield of contemporary anthropology rest on the
way in which the feigned immobility of things is left unquestioned. From Ingolds perspec-
tive an intellectual acceptance of (or failure to question) the bounded form of things col-
ludes in reproducing a deceptive understanding of life itself. The focus on the circulation of
objects or the symbolic value of things, he argues, tends to abstract the object both from
the specificity of the materials of which it is composed, and from the wider relational field in
and through which both humans and things are enmeshed. Ingolds primary commitment
is to express a theory of human culture (human processes of learning, of knowledge, and of
skill) that does not have recourse to either an abstract (non-material) theory of mind, or a
determinist view of biology. His position draws strongly from Gibsons ecological psychol-
ogy (Gibson 1979). For Gibson, human perception (and by extension human learning, skill,
and knowledge) is intrinsically relational, and should thus be approached via an ecological
or situated understanding of human practice. Ingold develops this approach by arguing that
all beings, human and non-human alike, live immersed in material worlds, and all beings
have substance and engage other substances via their surface interactions. In this respect
life is taken as that which is constituted in the constant interplay between media (such as air,
water, earth), substances (the more or less stable material entities that constitute a world),
and the surfaces through which engagement takes place.
Broadly phenomenological approaches to the study of traditional craft practice that
focused on the embodied and attentive skills through which the craft practitioner engaged
the material world became central to this particular anthropology of perception. The craft
practitioners attention to the affordances (the material possibilities) and the resistance of
matter exemplified a sense of engagement which, for Ingold, offered a counterpoint to mod-
ernist production practices reliant on abstraction and planning, and a mechanistic under-
standing of the relation between active human agency and a passive material world. Craft
itself was reconfigured in this approach away from a static notion of traditional practice
to an emphasis on the relational dynamics of a practice founded on skilled attention and
responsiveness to the emergent properties of materials. It is in this embodied relationship
to materials that craft practice became the template or exemplar of all human learning, and
ultimately for life itself. For what people learn in their dynamic and embodied engagements
with the world is the specificity of their own humanity (Keller and Keller 1996; Bunn 1999,

6
Cited in Ingold 2011: 13.

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 58 Penny Harvey

2010; Marchand 2001, 2009; Venkatesan 2002, 2009). The insights of this approach allow
for a dynamic yet situated understanding of the formation of cultural worlds. At the same
time the generality of the claims suggests that these relational dynamics could and should
be extended to those fields of skill and expertise more commonly associated with modern
knowledge and learning that Ingold is less interested in. Modern science and craft practice
tend to be construed as mutually exclusive by those who take science to exemplify a mod-
ern determination either to ignore the liveliness of matter, or to attempt to transform or
tame such liveliness from the outside, rather than assuming an engaged participation in the
ongoing process of the worlds transformation (Ingold 2011: 8).
There are different arguments and tensions here than previously discussed with respect
to studies of material culture, although once again it is the distinction between the opening
of materials and the closure of objects that comes to the fore. Latourian actor-network-
theory comes in for particular criticism with what Ingold sees as a predilection for the trac-
ing of networks of engagement between fixed human and material entities rather than an
appreciation of the provisional and contingent meshworks that better describe the relations
between media, substance, and surface that characterize Gibsonian ecological thinking.
However, those who engage more directly with the practices of science and technology have
many interests and understandings in commonnot least the recognition of the vitality of
materials, and the importance of moving away from assumptions of material passivity.
The ground-breaking studies of historians of science (e.g. Latour 1988, or Shaffer and
Shapin 1989) set out to examine precisely how it was that the hard and fast modern world
of matters of fact was ever established in a world of movement, process, and intrinsic rela-
tionality. Latour was fascinated by the ways in which modern scientific practice enables
the abstraction and mobilization of entities such as the microbe (Latour 1988), and the
development of the instruments and institutions through which such objects could be both
created and replicated has been central to our understandings of the ways in which mod-
ern science has come to shape human and planetary environments (Latour 1987; Haraway
1989, 1991; Bensaude and Stengers 1996). The key point that these STS (science and tech-
nology studies) scholars draw attention to is the extent to which scientific practice, like
any other, involves both sensory perception and practical engagement (see also Webmoor,
this volume). Indeed the development of scientific instruments is primarily an attempt to
extend rather than to simply replace human sensory capacitiesto enable the scientist to
make visible the imperceptible (Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Daston 2000, 2007; Galison and
Daston 2007; Edwards, Harvey, and Wade 2010), to capture the traces of those physical
movements that human beings cannot otherwise detect (Traweek 1988), and to fashion
the environments in which specific non-human relations might be coaxed into the realm
of human perception. Indeed far from taking objects for granted, the struggle is often pri-
marily to try to arrest the movement of matter sufficiently to understand something of
what relation a specific ecology might or might not entail, or to detect basic patternings
of material transformations such that something can be made of them. It is in this respect
that the craft practice of the weaver or the hunter is not necessarily of a different order
from that of the scientist. The skills of effective engagement are still acquired through prac-
tice and participation (Grasseni 2007). Neither surgeons nor engineers learnt their craft
from books alone (Lave and Wenger 1991; Harvey and Venkatesan 2010; McDonald 2013),
and even the skills of the historian or philosopher emerge from an attentive and embod-
ied engagement with books and words as the materials of their craft. Furthermore, what

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 Anthropological approaches 59

much of this work on modern knowledge practice brings back into the frame is the central
importance of the tensions between engaged connectivity and the need to establish ones
distance, to the many ways in which abstraction and engagement are combined in human
practicewhether of craftspersons (Jones and Yarrow forthcoming), artists (Leach 2004;
Pinney 2005), hunters and shamans (Willerslev 2007), scientists and engineers (Candea
2010).7
It thus appears that if we focus on the intrinsic entanglements of materials and persons
then we can look at the material relations that compose human worlds without deciding in
advance that some material relations are more authentic, engaged, or indeed material than
others. But there is perhaps a further step that we might take, one that projects us back to
alchemical worlds of hidden properties and substances that do not easily reveal their prove-
nance, or to the histories that mark the terms of our environmental engagement from within.
Here I return to the sense of ontological politics with which we beganand the unsettling
qualities of materials that threaten to overwhelm human capacity to contain them.

4.3 The Unsettling Force of Materials

in Human Life

Material culture studies has itself taken a decidedly material turn in recent years with some
calling for a radical move away from those modes of analysis that focus on how humans
invest meanings in things, or project agency into things, by allowing things to speak for
themselves (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007).8 The suggestion is a call to researchers
to embrace the radical alterity of matter, and to approach the material world ontologically,
asking not how things become meaningful to human beings, but what these things are or
might be, on their own terms. The ambition of such a project is perhaps thwarted from
the start by our incapacity to interrogate the material world, except via human capacities
of perception. Nevertheless the positing of an approach to materials via a sense of onto-
logical disturbance is an interesting one and could perhaps be thought about in relation
to another long-standing anthropological interest in the liveliness of inorganic materials
and artefacts, which although prior to the current so-called ontological turn (Viveiros de
Castro 1998) always did argue for a non-representational approach to life (Wagner 1986;
Strathern 2001).
Many readers will have come across the arguments on agency in anthropological accounts
which attend to the ways in which things appear, or act, as persons. In Melanesian ethnog-
raphies the focus has been primarily on the ways in which objects are seen to gather prior
relations, skills, materials, and ideas, and carry these relations with them as they circulate,
as in the famous accounts of Melanesian exchange (e.g. Mauss 1954; Munn 1986; Strathern

7 This ongoing tension between engagement and detachment has been explored in a collaborative

anthropological project on detachment; see: <http://detachmentcollaboratory.org>.

8 For interesting exchange between Danny Miller and Martin Holbraad on the core thesis of this

book, see Millers Material World Blog at <http://blogs.nyu.edu/projects/materialworld/2006/12/

thinking_through_things.html>.

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 60 Penny Harvey

1988). The anxiety that surrounds ceremonial exchanges derives from the sense that these
exchange objects are made and/or put into circulation with transformative intent (Gell
1998). That is they do not simply materialize their own prior context (Pinney 2005), but
potentially reconfigure relations between human beings, placing at risk a persons sense of
who they are (Strathern 1991).
In a seminal essay Pels (1998) distinguished those theories of animate matter that assumed
the presence of spirit in matter (the animate force in this case being external to the material
that houses it) and theories of the fetish, where it is the spirit of matter itself that energizes the
artefact. For Ingold these distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic power and the related
concerns to classify and tease out the terms of the relationship between humans and inorganic
matter miss the point (Ingold 2011: 289). He appreciates Pelss description of the intrinsic
force of materials, but argues that there is no need to invoke the spirit of matter. There is no
mystery here, no need to develop theories of agency or notions of immaterial force. Those
who approach the material world as a world of animate force are simply acknowledging the
transforming and transformational dynamics of life. And indeed such an attitude is simply
common sense to those who have not been steeped in the feigned immobility imposed by the
categories of modern thought.
However, skilled attention and responsiveness to the emergent properties of materials
can be deeply disturbing, threatening, and undermining to human beings. In many parts of
the world what is glossed as resource extraction is experienced as a dangerous confronta-
tion with material forces, often imagined or portrayed as persons. To follow these conse-
quences of human material engagements, engagements which are ultimately the only way
that humans can interrogate the vitality of matter, can have profound consequences that
are not explored in the worlds of craft practice that Ingold is interested in. One of the most
influential ways of approaching this terrain can be found in the work of Taussig, an anthro-
pologist deeply indebted to Walter Benjamins fascination with the power of the intertex-
tual, the non-explicit, and the concealed. Taussigs approach to materials and animate or
lively matter entangles us in quite different relations than those which tend to appear in the
pages of Ingoldian analyses. Specifically his work exemplifies what Thoburn (2013), follow-
ing Pels, refers to as the excessive materiality of the fetish (Pels 1998: 99).

Gold and cocaine are fetishes, which is to say substances that seem to be a good deal more
than mineral or vegetable matter. . . . As fetishes, gold and cocaine play subtle tricks upon
human understanding. For it is precisely as mineral or as vegetable matter that they appear
to speak for themselves and carry the weight of human history in the guise of natural history.
(Taussig 2004: xviii)

The ways in which objects and materials come to carry the weight of human history has
been explored from many diverse perspectives that can take us into the psychoanalytic tra-
ditions that Freud initiated, through Marxist understandings of commodity fetishism and
more recent explorations of the social life of things, and the biographical accretions that
material culture studies has traced for all manner of things as they move between persons
and across time and space. The significance of human memory looms large in these debates,
as does the contemporary interest in the centrality of sensory engagement (Seremetakis
1994; Stoller 1997; Cowan and Navaro-Yashin 2007; Navaro-Yashin 2009).
Taussigs interest in human histories of extraction and of trade differ from many other
studies on the circulation of commodities because of the way in which he dwells on the

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 Anthropological approaches 61

visceral material engagements of human labour. The particularity of Taussigs work comes in
the connections he draws between the materials that craftsmen engage through their work,
and the labour involved in producing these materials in the first place. Most memorable
perhaps is his description of the indigo workers. Taussig describes the ways in which pig-
ments and smells invaded their bodies, the indigo seeping into the pores of the skin, staining
their internal organs, becoming integral to their bodies (Taussig 2008). Elsewhere he looks
at gold extraction, describing how workers lung capacities are stretched to the limit as they
dive below the water to fix the pumps that drive the gold deposits up into the mesh filters on
the shores of Amazonian rivers (Taussig 2004). Taussigs work shows how hard it is to dis-
tinguish materials from objects, or to sustain a sense of discrete materiality in circumstances
where bodily surfaces are routinely breached. It is not simply that the quite different prac-
tices of artist and labourer imply a different relationship between media, substance, and sur-
face. It is about how the categories of objects and material are themselves porous; they lack
self-evidence. The histories of materials tend to be hidden. They shock when they emerge.
The capacity of materials to shock in this way is not immediately accessible to a Gibsonian
perspective where the material surfaces through which human/material interaction takes
place are discrete (they dont seem to seep into each other in the ways that the indigo seeps
into the pores of the worker), and while the surface engagements through which we all live
in the world are indeed sensory, there is no clear explanation of how our sensory engage-
ments become charged with emotions, desires, or fears. I thus want to retain a way of
addressing the tangible presence of the immaterial, and the sense or suspicion that all might
not be as it seems, that material relations might be deceptive, devious, or indeed miraculous
and enchanting. My concern is that Ingoldian approaches to material life do not take the
immaterial seriously enough.
But many people in the world take such things very seriously indeed and one of the pecu-
liarities of the anthropological approach is that we try to take our lead from local concerns
and assumptions about life, watching and learning how others work out the implications
of living with living matter in worlds where life is precarious, and where other than human
forces routinely impinge on daily life. Such preoccupations may take us into spaces of prag-
matic accommodation, where the possibility of spiritual forces is respectfully embraced,
particularly in moments or spaces of existential uncertainty, such as those confronted by
the Siberian hunter in times of scarcity (Willerslev 2007) or the Tlingit traveller forced to
negotiate the dangerous ice-floes of the north-west American coastline (Cruikshank 2005).
Such precautionary attitudes are characteristic of human responses to uncertainty and they
are played out through a widespread awareness of the need to engage the material forces
of life in ways that are not simply traditional, but which promise new possibilities for con-
fronting challenging circumstances. Thus, for example, we find the recent change in the
Bolivian constitution to recognize the rights of Mother Earth9 suggests an opening to a new
ontological politics, as the material world is recognized as a significant force in combating
climate change. However, this recognition is not necessarily ontologically continuous with
other modes of ecological thinking. Timothy Mitchell, for example, has recently argued
that sustainable approaches to energy consumption should focus on energy as depletable
material substance, that is, as coal, oil, gas, rather than as abstract rates of flow (Mitchell

9 See <http://www.scribd.com/doc/44900268/Ley-de-Derechos-de-la-Madre-Tierra-Estado-

Plurinacional-de-Bolivia>.

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 62 Penny Harvey

2011). His approach takes an ecological or relational orientation, but does not posit the
personhood of carbon.
Archaeologists typically work from fragments. As archaeologists face the mystery of
things in their incompletion and detachment from life processes, the tendency is to look for
ways to reconnect and to imaginatively reconstruct their relational dynamics. However, at
this time when awareness of the vitality of matter is creating new and unforeseen alliances,
and philosophers of science begin to articulate the need for a new accommodation and
understanding between modern science and other knowledges (Stengers 2010, 2011) it is
perhaps important to bear in mind all that we do not know about what materials are and
what they might become.
This chapter opened with the extreme example of nuclear waste disposal in order to
invoke the specific challenge that our contemporary relational awareness creates for those
of us invested in the social consequences of material life. I was struck by the way in which
the engineers at Onkalo were looking to foster a sense of ontological doubt in future genera-
tions. They wondered if they might propagate a legend that would deter the curious, and
that might wrap the site of nuclear disposal with a sense of dread sufficient to deter human
intrusion in the future. Their deliberations continue. Meanwhile as other people in other
places try to imagine the future of the planet both for and beyond humans we find the
acknowledgement of the significance of the vitality of matter returning to centre stage
and along with it perhaps a new curiosity concerning other ways of relating to non-human
worlds as central to the survival of our species.

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