Garbography: Tracing waste as material data

Abstract

This article reconsiders the relation between ethnographic accounts and non-human inscriptions by tracing waste as material data. It engages with the dynamism of residual matter at the epistemic level while aiming at expanding the range of possibilities of research on waste. What we call garbography unsettles the predominant meaning-centric understanding of our methods by paying attention to the expressiveness of residual matter as an asemic inscription or graphein of sorts: in its propensity to leak, rot, grow, mould, tarnish, and stink, waste ‘writes’ by leaving marks. To practice garbography is thus to be involved in exercises of tracing material inscriptions that might not be directly translatable to verbal language. After providing a series of examples from fieldwork in post-industrial settings of Estonia, we conclude that by thinking with traces and approaching waste in the writing, we can better understand non-human socialities and how the organic, the symbolic, and matter are entangled.