Talking Trash and the Politics of Disregard

Abstract

One of my favourite photos of my son is him as an over-tired, dishevelled and very disgruntled five-year-old. He stands, holding out two globs of unidentifiable rusted metal, and looks at the camera (at me), with an accusing, penetrating glare (Fig. 1). As a distracted, overextended parent trying to run an archaeological field project (the Rising Sun Hotel in New Orleans), I had sent him to play in the dirt—the back dirt of our discard pile. I thought that's where he couldn't get into any trouble. I didn't imagine that it would get me into trouble. He was mad because we had overlooked these obvious artefacts (he had already grasped the subtle nature/culture distinction of the archaeological sorting process). We had disregarded them. We had attempted to make them unworthy of notice. What my son, in his innocence, was enunciating is the intentionality of ignoring something—and with intentionality, there is always a potential politics. That is what I would like to focus on here: how can we approach Beiläufigkeit—the incidental and taken-for-granted—as indexical of politics?