Working out Douglas’s aphorism: Discarded objects, categorisation practices, and moral inquiries:
Summary (2 min read)
Remarks on field site, data and method
- The remainder of the article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Upper Town district of Gibraltar; the old cultural hub of the city, built on the lower slopes of its famous Rock.
- The dense architecture casts a semi-permanent shadow over the space, making the streets dark as well as quiet.
- The gaps between themalong streets too narrow for mechanised sweepers and vehiclesare regularly maintained by a team of street-cleaners.
- The tape recorder is important, but a lot of this can be done without a tape recorder.
The categorisational troubles of seeing waste
- 4 The decision to anonymise was taken in consultation with the informant, although he was happy enough for his real name to be used.
- Whilst the encounter of dog and monkey faeces by Stephen occasions cleaning in a relatively straightforward manner, the encounter of other natural objects that do not elo g o the pa e e t poses different questions for the public in terms of the responsibility for their removal.
- Blossom is, apparently, viewed as an expectable and tolerated element of the street scene, where other natural deposits are not.
- The apparent public acceptance of, or lack of concern for, the presence of blossoms can be juxtaposed with an event in which Stephen received several reports of a dead seagull further along the route.
- Residents expressed revulsion at the decaying body, punctuated with surface melancholia for the dead animal, and identified Stephen as the kind of agent who might expectedly deal with it.
Possessitives and possessables, obstacles and disposables
- If you have a possessitive you can be much more casual about itdrop it in the street, leave it in front of your houseand people will not thereby take it that if they want it they can just pick it up.
- Or if they do, then you can well claim that they are thieves.
- Stephen bends down and moves to dispose of it in the bin liner that he is carrying, only for the owner of the pet salon (smoking outside her premises) to interrupt him by shouting across the street to him that the cans belong to the street performer.
- Again, objects are viewed and constituted differently in and through different course of action.
- Residential buildings in Upper Town, particularly those occupied by older local (and largely Catholic) residents, are occasionally decorated with religious statues and shrines.
(Insert Fig.3 here) Fig. : A pri ate 'o a Catholi shri e i pu li space
- Stephen is aware of the technical illegality of these objects, which obstruct the public highway (sometimes in a very real sense, protruding far enough into the narrow thoroughfares to restrict movement, particularly of pushchairs and wheelchairs), but will simply work around them.
- The first way of the viewing the phenomenon is a cultural understanding, in which the viewing of the statues as belonging is explainable through reference to a perceived permanence and durability and what they represent, religiously and in terms community identity.
- A historical and cultural permanence, rather than a material permanencethe statues and planters will have suffered chips, scuffs, and damage, and will have been replaced throughout the passage of time by other similar objects.
- This issue is further developed in their next, and final, empirical section.
Seeing categories through discarded objects
- We, now, arrive at what was offered as the main contribution of the article.
- The appearance of the woman as Stephen makes his round occasions category work relating to the wider neighbourhood in which the encounter takes place.
- Again, actionswhether seen or reportedcan be bound to population categories not only as something that was done by that category of person, but as a thing that that category of person does.
- It would have originally been propped up in nook between two perpendicular walls and a fire hydrant, but it has since been knocked over and torn into by either seagulls or monkeys.
- "tephe e lai s, isi l irate, as he moves towards the bag with malice aforethought, ripping it further along one of the pre-existing tears.
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Citations
10 citations
Cites background from "Working out Douglas’s aphorism: Dis..."
...Things being in the proper place creates social order (Edensor, 2005) – a perspective mirrored in discussions of dirt (Ablitt & Smith, 2019) to which I will now turn....
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8 citations
4 citations
References
6 citations
"Working out Douglas’s aphorism: Dis..." refers background in this paper
...As Stephen himself suggests in the previous extract, the seeing of perpetrators of such actions, and their ‘residual identity’ (Williams, 2003), is also organised through category work....
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...There exists a small body of literature concerned with the categorisation of detritus as making available ‘residual categories’, for example in crime scene investigation (Williams, 2003)....
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...There were other occasions when, much like Williams’ (2003) crime scene investigators, Stephen’s work was concerned with identifying and pursuing individuals responsible for discarding objects or inappropriately disposing of bin bags....
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4 citations
4 citations
"Working out Douglas’s aphorism: Dis..." refers background in this paper
...Fardon, R. (2013). Citations out of place. Anthropology Today, 29, 25–27 Fitzgerald, R. & Housley, W. (2002). Identity, categorization and sequential organization: the sequential and categorial flow of identity in a radio phone-in....
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...Douglas attributes it to Lord Chesterfield but this is also contested (see Fardon, 2013) example, those described in Oakley’s (1983) study of Gypsies) are best understood not as bounded cultural systems but as producing boundary relations in and through which toilets can produce ‘wrong’ connections…...
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3 citations
"Working out Douglas’s aphorism: Dis..." refers background in this paper
...As we have indicated above, objects found discarded in the street are also available as being read through and as something like a ‘commonsense topography’ (Smith, 2013) of the area....
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