Daniel Sosna

Using and valuing resources is a vital component of human life. Yet as much as resources such as water, land, or fuel contribute to the flourishing of communities, they also constitute objects of contestation and conflict. This entry highlights a range of conceptual and thematic ways in which anthropologists have studied resources. First, resources constitute a means of livelihood and sociality that shape human lives in significant ways. Second, resources emerge from material and conceptual relations between humans and environments, offering insight into what societies deem good and valuable. Third, resources are key to different modes of production in which their accumulation and the scale of their use create and perpetuate unequal distributions of goods, labour, and power. Finally, resources have increasingly been analysed as vehicles of resistance and of (re-)negotiating the ethical underpinnings of their extraction. Using examples of food provisioning, this entry will show that all four ways of thinking about resources—as means of livelihood, results of relations, determinants of modes of production, and vehicles of resistance—elucidate important debates. They teach us about value extraction and commodification, sustainable and excessive modes of consumption, and the exploitation of people and environments. The four conceptualisations of resources presented here share a range of premises, yet they also have points of friction that limit their seamless combination. Holding different ways of thinking about resources in tension is necessary to account for their use and for conflict in times of diminishing liveability for human and non-human beings on the planet.

This article examines the internal dynamics and relationality of moral economies. It focuses on labor relations to understand how people find balance between collective moral frameworks and individual everyday acts. Drawing on ethnographic research among Czech landfill workers during the neoliberalization of the waste industry in the 2010s, the article explores two spheres of waste management: the informal scavenging of landfill workers and the management of wastewater. Salvaging things via scavenging and management of wastewater provides two arenas for analyzing the ways people reason about the good, dignity, and justice while following their own goals. Using inspirations from the scholarship on moral economy and everyday ethics, the author argues that these two theoretical directions may benefit from the respective strengths of each other’s approaches: a capacity to recognize patterns of moral reasoning behind struggles for dignity in an unequal world versus an actor-oriented situational sense of ethics growing from everyday life on the ground. The article points at a scalar reshaping of moral economies and brings attention to a morality that does not reflect only direct transactions but also more imaginative relations to distant others.

Quantification has become a privileged form of knowing and vehicle of governance. Anthropological critique has demonstrated that a view of numbers as independent carriers of meaning is untenable; instead, numbers should be conceptualized as being part of relations and temporalities, opening space for shifts in understanding. Proposing the perspective of ‘ecologies of quantification’, we acknowledge the wider notion of ecology that accommodates materiality, cognition, and experience, and acknowledges that the constituents of the relations are always in a process of becoming. We put waste management at the centre of our interest to explore the ways quantification attempts to conquer arguably one of the unruliest domains of contemporary social life. Based on our collaborative ethnographic research on the management of municipal solid waste, discarded electrical and electronic devices, and junked cars in Czechia, we point to problems emerging when numbers become stripped of their relations. Our research sheds light on experience in the process of quantification and demonstrates that there are multiple ways to know quantity.

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.

This article focuses on alcohol consumption among the migrant workers living in the dormitories in the Pilsen region, Czech Republic, to understand different notions of personhood in the changing and uncertain environment of multinational industrial companies. The authors combined garbological analysis of waste with interaction with the inhabitants of two dormitories to account for potential bias in exploring a sensitive topic such as alcohol consumption. They argue that drinking provides an arena for becoming a person embedded in social relations, acting and experiencing the world in a way that contrasts with the neoliberal emphasis on individuality and flexibility. It is a strategy that pursues stability and mutuality in uncertain times. Also, drinking helps to temporarily escape inequality and dissatisfaction with the living conditions of those who became doomed to the symbolic bottom of the social hierarchy.

The contributions in this issue of Social Science Computer Review represent a range of computational approaches to theoretical and disciplinary specializations in anthropology that reflect on and expand the future orientation and practice of the formal and comparative agenda in the context of an increasing emphasis on complexity in anthropology as a discipline. Themes covered in this issue include kinship, funerary burials, urban legends, eye tracking, and looking at mode influences on online data collection. A common theme throughout the articles is examining the relationship between global emergent processes and structures and the local individual contributions to this emergence, and how the local and global contexts influence each other. We argue that unless complexity is addressed more overtly by leveraging computational approaches to data collection, analysis and theory building, anthropology and social science more generally face an existential challenge if they are to continue to pursue extended field research exercise, intersubjective productions, deep personal involvement, interaction with materiality, and engagement with people while generating research outcomes of relevance to the world beyond the narrow confines of specialist journals and conferences.

This article demonstrates the analytical potential of graph theory for understanding mortuary practices in past societies. We take advantage of social network analysis software PAJEK to model relationships among burials. The case study of the Early Bronze Age cemetery Rebešovice (Czech Republic) is used to explore the potential of the network approach to explain the contrast between the center and the periphery of the cemetery. Two hypotheses are proposed to explain this contrast: Chronological and social. The first hypothesis explains the difference between the center and the periphery as an effect of social standing, while the latter as an effect of time. The data set includes archaeological and biological data from 72 burials. We calculate simple matching distance matrices as a measure of dissimilarity among the burials based on socially and chronologically significant variables and Euclidean matrix as a measure of spatial proximity among pairs of graves. We project the results into geographic space and compare the patterns with the expectations derived from the two research hypotheses. The evaluation of results allows us to reject both hypotheses and formulate a new model of spatial organization based on a few contemporary subsections of the cemetery used by different corporate groups. Finally, the potential of computer-aided modeling of matrices and graphs is discussed in context of other analytical techniques used for the investigation of intracemetery mortuary variability.