Science, Medicine, and Anthropology http://somatosphere.net http://somatosphere.net/?p=13839 Waste 2017-10-23 16:06:33 By Jennifer Wenzel Waste is a tricky word. In our meditations in Somatosphere, waste hews toward its concrete sense as discard: material byproducts of some transformative process, metabolic or mechanical; things past the end of their wonted, wanted life. Quite literally, waste isn’t what it used to be. It hangs around when and (as Mary Douglas says of dirt) where it isn’t wanted. If we (and it) are lucky, some bricoleur arrives to breathe new life into it. But waste isn’t what it used to be in quite another sense; within this linguistic tangle lurk confusions and implied narratives underwriting a more fundamental problem with waste. In the beginning, John Locke declares in “Of Property,” all the world was waste: empty, as-yet unproductive land given by the Creator to men in common. Their duty was to be makers, of a particular sort: to enclose some parcel of it by right of their labor, to keep it from merely lying waste. The only limit to this process that Locke could imagine involved yet another kind of waste: nobody should enclose more land than they could use the produce from before it spoiled. Money – “a little piece of yellow metal, which would keep without wasting or decay” (Locke, 1986: V.37) – cheated the time of nature by enabling accumulation without spoilage, the industrious improvement of waste land without the sin of wasted produce. Money is the magic bean that resolves the contradiction between “letting waste and making waste” (Ince, 2001: 43). We know how this story ends. The enclosure of the commons and the exclusion of communities from sites of livelihood. The Industrial Revolution and European colonialism as a global delivery device for private property regimes. Waste lands “improved” into wasted lands and wasted lives: places and people laid waste. And burgeoning piles of waste in that concrete sense with which I began, which turns out be secondary in the process of enclosing waste in the primary (but largely forgotten) sense of the word. An indispensible account of the aesthetics and politics of waste in these myriad senses appears in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Ayi Kwei Armah’s classic novel of postcolonial disillusionment in Ghana. Throughout the novel recur references to a peculiar bird, whose habitat and behaviors offer suggestive resonances with the predicaments of page 1 / 8