Home Possessions: Part and Parcel of the Anthropocene

Karwai Ng

This article assesses whether home possessions have begun to take on a paradoxical thing- and object-like quality (Ingold, 2012) in the age of the Anthropocene. Through ethnographies of junk electronics and compost toilets in North American homes, I argue we can begin to understand home possessions through a sedimentary approach: as processual parts and parcels within a larger meshwork of infrastructures, ecologies, and ordinary human agencies. Starting from an auto-ethnography of a Waterstones.com book delivery, I show how the object-material/thing divide can no longer adequately explain the sedimentary, Anthropogenic materiality of home possessions that ‘spill over’ (Ingold, 2012) into domestic thresholds. In no other place is the Anthropogenic, occasionally anxiety-laden tug-and-pull of home possessions more pertinent than in the home.

In Ted Chiang’s Nebula Award winning short story, ‘The Tower of Babylon’ (1990), Chiang adapts the Tower of Babel origin myth in Genesis 11:1–9 to tell the story of miners climbing up the Tower of Babylon (a ‘four month’ journey from base to summit) to dig through the vault of heaven (‘Chambers in Heavens’ – Figure 1). Eventually, the main protagonist, Hillalum, reaches the vault, a liminal zone that is neither sky nor land.

One day, Hillalum hears a deafening roar and discovers they have cracked through the reservoirs above the vault. The tunnels fill with water, and Hillalum begins to drown. As he surrenders to his fate, Hillalum finds himself re-emerged on land. ‘He had climbed the reservoirs of heaven, and arrived back at the earth. […] Somehow, the vault of heaven lay beneath the earth. It was as if they lay against each other, though they were separated by many leagues. How could such distant places touch?’ (pp. 33-34).

Hillalum finds his answer in cylinder seals (Figure 2) – ancient seals with embossed scenes that could be rolled onto clay tablets to form visual imprints. He uses the analogy to describe how ‘Two figures might appear at opposite ends of the tablet, though they stood side by side on the surface of the cylinder’ (p. 34). In Hillalum’s view, the same could be said of the earth and heaven: they were stretched out at opposite ends in the human imagination, when in reality were ‘wrapped around in some fantastic way so that heaven and earth touched’ (p. 34).  

I begin with this story to pose a somewhat controversial thought: can the separation between objects and things in material culture be said to conflate etic and emic approaches when, in fact, objects and things are figuratively and analytically ‘closer’ together than we think? To take it further, can an object or thing be said to inhabit both object- and thing-like qualities?

Starting with home possessions in the West, I investigate whether domestic objects have begun to take on a ‘thing’- or material-like quality in the age of the Anthropocene, the idea that the Earth ‘has entered a new epoch as a result of human activity’ (Lorimer, 2016, p. 117). Here, I start with the definitions of ‘object’ and ‘thing’ from Tim Ingold’s essay ‘Towards an Ecology of Things’ (2012), where he defines materials as ‘substances-in becoming’ against objects that are ‘complete and ready-made’ (p. 435). Influenced by Martin Heidegger, Ingold introduces the concept of ‘thing’ to describe ‘a gathering of materials in movement’ (p. 436), which has the potential for ‘further making, growth, and transformation’ (pp. 435-436).

My interest in home possessions in addressing the dialectic between object and thing began with the global study Home Possessions (2001), where Daniel Miller and his co-students explored ‘ethnographic encounters that took place behind the closed doors of domestic homes’ (p. 1), and the wide-ranging practices of how ‘a home and its inhabitants transform[ed] each other’ (p. 2). These studies were significant in moving beyond structuralist or symbolic representations of the home against ‘normative order’ (p. 3), as well as assessing the home solely through the agencies of human actors. As Miller writes in the introduction, ‘Instead of looking at what we do with homes, the second part of this book examines what the home does with us. The concern is with the agency of the home itself’ (p. 4).

I situate the home within the Anthropocene because the home is ‘a key site of everyday life, and a context where significant interventions towards achieving important goals – such as sustainable futures, gender-equitable ways of living – might be focused’ (emphasis added; Pink et. al, 2017, p. 19). In no other place is the Anthropogenic, occasionally anxiety-laden tug-and-pull of home possessions more pertinent than in the home. As Elizabeth Chin writes in her self-ethnography aptly titled My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries (2016), ‘It seems no accident that as we recognize the current geologic eras as the Anthropocene, the place of the human (with all its problematic baggage) in relation to all things is being anxiously interrogated’ (p. 19). Building on Amelia Moore’s (2015) observation that ‘anthropologists have a responsibility to explicate the local effects of global transformation in order to fill in gaps in Western scientific knowledge about anthropogenic change’ (p. 35), I seek to investigate the domestic effects of the Anthropocene through the interplay of home possessions, human agency and infrastructures.  

In this way, this essay seeks to revitalise home possessions in the Anthropocene. Moving beyond Tim Ingold’s (2012) dichotomy of material/thing vs. object, I argue we can begin to understand home possessions through a ‘sedimentary approach. As I will show, home possessions are not simply finished, ready-made objects, but sedimented object-things comprising processual layers of human agencies, infrastructures and ecologies. Arguably, possessions in the Anthropocene are part and parcel of complex entanglements of infrastructures and natural systems. Thus, we might consider home possessions as sedimentary objects and things – composed of paradoxically stabilising and transforming qualities.

Briefly returning to Chiang’s story, I argue Chiang’s book itself can be read as part and parcel, both object and thing. For instance, shortly after the Covid-19 lockdown was announced in the UK on the 23rd of March, 2020, I placed an order for Stories of Your Life and Others (2016) – Chiang’s short story collection – from Waterstones.com (a UK book retailer). The book arrived in a typical online delivery cardboard box. Clutching the opened box in my hands before putting it into the recycling bin, I was aware of the packaging waste I had inadvertently generated, the carbon footprint involved in its delivery, the human labour in ‘picking’ the order, the payment infrastructures that had powered the transaction, the electricity required to operate the laptop I had placed the order from, the server energies used to support Waterstones’s e-commerce infrastructure, the carbon footprint of Waterstones’ website (Figure 3), not to mention the potential COVID-19 traces left on the cardboard box… The list goes on.

Arguably, in this case, the book within the box as a package-to-be-delivered is literally part and parcel, both object and thing. In the reverse chaîne opératoire I have just attempted, one begins to see the sedimentary layers behind this part (book) and parcel (box). As I toss the box into the recycling bin, I am also performing a conscious act of recognising the box’s material as recyclable/disposable, while treating the book as a temporarily stabilised ‘object’ to consume for reading later. What I hope to suggest through this mini auto-ethnography is that the object-material/thing divide can no longer adequately explain the sedimentary, Anthropogenic materiality of home possessions that ‘spill over’ (Ingold, 2012) into domestic thresholds.

I will first examine theories of materiality and the home before assessing home possessions at the threshold of disposal ­­­in North American homes. As Jennifer Gabrys (2011) writes, ‘Consumption emerges not just as a process of dissolution that spurs new production but as a drawn-out process of “dispossession” and “demattering” that critically calls attention to how we get rid of things, how they circulate, where those things go, what residues they leave behind, and what political economies and ecologies they bind together’ (p. 97). I focus on this period to highlight people’s negotiations with home possessions and their sedimentary layers in the Anthropocene.  

Material Culture in the Home

In ‘Towards an Ecology of Things’ (2012), Ingold proposes an ‘ecology of materials that focuses on their enrolment in form-making processes’ (p. 428). He argues that the material cultural turn of the 1970s led to a split between material culture studies and ecological anthropology, and that the emphasis on materiality ‘priortis[ed] finished artifacts over properties of materials’ (p. 427) in ‘an ongoing process of objectification’ (p. 435). Instead, Ingold asks us to look at a ‘world of materials, [where] nothing is ever finished’ (p. 435).

Ingold’s analysis is useful in thinking about the transformative capacities of home possessions. His critique of Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 1991) in knitting together inanimate objects – ‘Latour’s is an ecology bereft of energy and materials’ (pp. 436-437) –highlights how instead, we can think of home possessions as situated within a ‘meshwork’ of ‘occurrent things [co-responding] along their manifold lines of becoming’ (p. 437). In this way, instead of weaving together static actants into an assemblage, we can look at the stitching together of materials that co-respond in a processual meshwork.

However, as I will illustrate through ethnographic studies of home consumption and waste, the dialectic of object versus thing does not abide by such simple terms. Moreover, the focus on ‘meshwork’ fails to acknowledge the importance of everyday human decision-making and infrastructures. There is a risk that ‘meshwork’ becomes yet another analytical substitute for ‘network’ in Actor-Network Theory, when both are operating on similar levels of decentring the human (despite the former’s attempt to include the transforming qualities of materials-as-actants).

Here, I bring in Roxana Moroşanu’s (2016) critique of vitalist theories such as affect theory (Massumi, 2002) and Actor-Network Theory in her ethnography of household energy demand in the UK to highlight the role of human agency. Following Henrietta Moore (2011), Moroşanu argues that in their efforts to decentre the human, vitalist theories have masked the significance of human creativity, agency and decision-making, as well as the ‘cultural specificities of the contexts in which life takes place’ (p. 22). As Moroşanu illustrates in her ethnography of the ‘everydayness of energy’ (p. 4) across twenty family participants in the UK, the fact that people choose to ‘let light in’ every morning by drawing the curtains is not a matter of light entering (p. 22); it is a micrological act. As she writes:

People choose when to open and when to close curtains and blinds; their actions do not “produce” the light, but, more importantly, make manifest an engagement with the world that recognizes, accepts, and lets light in. (ibid)

In this scene, Moroşanu highlights the unconscious, ‘everydayness’ of human agency that ‘lets light in’. I use Moroşanu’s example here not to recentre human agency in my analysis of home possessions, but to emphasise how humans and objects/things co-respond to inform the daily and ordinary rhythms of life, thus constituting ‘ordinary agencies’ in the home.  

Towards a Sedimentary Ecology of Home Possessions  

By tying Ingold and Moroşanu’s theoretical frameworks, I hope to show how we can shift towards a sedimentary ecology in understanding home possessions. This recognises that possessions are at once part and parcel, object and thing, within a meshwork of ordinary agencies and digital and physical infrastructures.

Traces of this approach can be found in Gabrys’ (2011) study of digital rubbish, where she describes how ‘The sedimentary layers of [e]-waste consist not only of circuit boards and copper wires, material flows and global economies, but also of technological imaginings, progress narratives, and material temporalities’ (p. 4). Gabrys makes it clear that waste does not only include the ‘actual garbage of discarded machines’ (ibid) but also the utopic narratives around technology, thus alluding to the role of the human imagination in stabilising ‘objects’ and discourses.

However, I depart from Gabrys’ sociological analysis to include the role of home possessions in ethnography – an attempt to bring the micrological and quotidian in conversation with planetary dimensions of the Anthropocene. Furthermore, instead of ‘progress narratives’ and ‘technological imaginings’, I focus on narratives of waste to show how home possessions are taking on a thing-like quality as residents also begin to think from materials and objects, not just about them (Ingold, 2012, p. 437). As I will demonstrate, thinking ‘from’ constitutes taking into consideration the objects’ potential afterlives and connections to infrastructures and ecological systems.

Before I turn to ethnographies of home possessions, I wish to draw attention to how the term ‘sedimented’ can also be interpreted – on the contrary – as a synonym for the ‘stabilising’ or ‘naturalising’ of technological discourse, in what Judith Butler (1993) terms ‘sedimented effects’ (cited in Gabrys, 2011, p. 9). As Gabrys observes:

Material appears to be given—as matter—because it has stabilized or sedimented, as Butler writes, “over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter.” This is the “process of materialization.” (ibid)

This is significant, as the connotations of ‘sediments’ therefore both stabilise and transform, implying yet again the paradoxical duality of object and thing, the cylinder seal comprising both part and parcel. For instance, the ‘sediments’ making up the sedimentary layers that Gabrys speaks of are not static; she refers to ‘material flows’, ‘technological imaginings’ and ‘material temporalities’, which then coalesce and stabilise into the ‘sedimented effects’ of technological discourse we see today. In this way, I use the term ‘sedimentary’­ to emphasise the duality of object and thing in home possessions.  

I will now share two ethnographies of home possessions related to disposal. From junk drawers of old technological devices to compost toilets in California, I show how we can begin to see objects as processual parts and parcels within a larger meshwork of infrastructures, ecologies and ordinary human agencies. The ethnographies I have selected take place in North American homes, thereby illuminating one of many plural ways of living and making (Escobar, 2018) with home possessions in the Anthropocene.  

In the below sections, I will use the term ‘object’ when referring to home possessions to avoid perpetuating the divide between object and thing. In doing so, I hope to emphasise that objects embody various degrees of transforming and stabilising qualities at once.

Junk Drawers of Deferred Disposal

In 2015, researchers Shannon McMullen, Laura Zanotti and H. Kory Cooper began a multi-year Electronic Life Histories Project in Indiana to assess the quotidian ‘entanglements among people, electronics and waste-making’ in the home (2019, p. 1). In particular, they wanted to understand ‘How do individuals categorize and treat electronic objects at a phase in their life history that is the least understood – the moment when they move from use to storage to discard?’ (ibid).

The project’s research design involved asking students from Purdue University to take pictures of and reflect on their household e-waste, mobilised through what they termed ‘The Junk Drawer Project’ (Figure 4). As the authors explain, ‘The junk drawer represents a very particular phenomenon of household material culture where electronics are part of larger collections which hover at the stage between storage and discard’ (McMullen, Zanotti and Cooper, 2019, p. 1).

The project revealed that students still kept dated electrical devices – iPods, flip phones, TV controllers, video cameras – despite not having uses for them anymore. This was due to different reasons, some of which included the devices’ affective associations (e.g. a Wii gaming console bringing back memories of the family playing together in the living room), as well as their roles in archiving parts of the self.

However, some electronics were retained despite exuding what the authors term ‘negative affects’ (ibid, p. 6). For instance, several participants described their electronic objects as ‘waste’ and exhibited concerns over their ecological impact, inconvenience of repair or recycling and responsible disposal (ibid). In these instances, the junk drawer was mobilised to defer the potential disposal of objects in a ‘two-stage holding process’ (Hetherington, cited in Evans, 2012, p. 46) before reaching the final stage: the landfill. The junk drawer became a central participant in forestalling the disposal of objects to ‘ameliorate anxieties about acts of binning’ (Evans, 2012, p. 52).

In this way, the Junk Drawer Project reveals how unconscious, ordinary agencies (Moroşanu, 2011) paradoxically stabilise the transforming potentials of junk drawer electronics, for instance a student’s decision to keep a device despite intending to throw it away. As one student wrote of their iPod, ‘Ipods [sic] are pretty neutral objects that have popularity spanning beyond that which I identify with. It has no value and I will be disposing of it. Due to the millions of people that bought this model, one could argue towards the lack of human agency’ (ibid). Worth noting here is the student’s intent of disposal that has not been followed through by action. Thus, in contrast to Ingold’s (2012) call for an ecology of materials shifting from the ‘objectness’ of things to their ‘material flows and processes’ (p. 431), I argue the bringing back of ordinary agency highlights people’s (un)conscious desire to delay the material flow of an ‘object’ – to keep an object in stasis, while acknowledging its propensity for change and potential afterlives post-disposal.

In this sense, the Junk Drawer Project suggests that one can be ‘at home with e-waste’ (McMullen, Zanotti and Cooper, 2019, p. 4), a statement reinforcing electronic home possessions as both objects and things, such that waste becomes a metonymy of electronics. By focusing on the ‘time and space between consumption and disposal’ (p. 6), the authors of the Junk Drawer Project highlight the role of quotidian, micrological negotiations at the household scale in deferring the casting away of objects. Moreover, students’ concerns with the objects’ afterlives signal an Anthropogenic awareness of whether an electronic device is properly disposed of or re-circulated through sustainable means.

Thus, a post-vitalist reading of electronic objects highlights the role of ordinary agencies in stabilising an object’s potential to transform, while alluding to people’s awareness of an object’s ‘thing-like’, transformative qualities. As the authors note, ‘objects that are at the interstices of wasting practices embody, represent, and express many meanings to participants socially, spatially, and structurally’ (p. 10). Peering through junk drawers, we learn to take into consideration local and cultural specificities of sedimentary layers in home possessions.

Compost Toilets: Flows of Disposal

Next, I turn to Michael Vine’s (2018) ethnography in the drought-ridden deserts of Southern California to show how ordinary agencies co-mingle with objects to perpetuate the flows of disposal. In a yearlong study that began in June 2014, Vine followed a group of middle-class, Anglo-American desert residents who had begun to refashion their homes in ‘everyday experiments’ amidst the worsening effects of climate change in California. Examples include replacing the quintessential American turfgrass lawn with drought-tolerant plants or irrigating home edible gardens with makeshift rainwater-harvesting systems. Vine’s focus on the built environment is significant; as Victor Buchli (2013) observes, ‘consumption-oriented approaches [of the home] were often done at the expense of the analysis of the architectural form’ (p. 119). Vine’s study brings home possessions, ordinary agencies and the built environment within a sedimentary meshwork of everyday experimentation.

In particular, Vine’s ethnography of composting toilets among several Southern Californian residents – in what he terms ‘excremental countercultures’ (p. 410) ­– highlights residents’ awareness of the sedimentary ecologies comprising materials, ordinary agencies and infrastructures in home possessions. As Vine explains, the compost toilet is not attached to ‘domestic freshwater supply or wastewater-removal systems’ (p. 411). Instead of a ‘flush’ of water, human waste is mixed with straw, sawdust or peat moss to help mitigate unpleasant odours, which is then gradually broken down through heat and aerobic microbes in situ (ibid). Once the waste has been composted for a year and is ‘safe’ to use, Danny, one of Vine’s participants, explains that ‘we put it in the garden. Now my waste is generating tasty fruit and vegetables, and I love that, because on a daily basis I’m reconnected to the nutrient cycle’ (ibid).

In contrast to theories of waste and infrastructure, which have tended to associate the visibility of materials (see Gregson, Watkins and Calestani, 2010) and infrastructures upon breakdown (Star, 1999), residents of the high desert town of Joshua Tree have begun to ‘manipulate the otherwise hidden hydraulic infrastructures of everyday life’ (Vine, 2018, p. 411), while displaying great sensitivities to material changes through the senses. For instance, scent is used to detect the material conditions of the compost. ‘Alcoholic or fruity smells can mean too much starch or sugar, ammonia is a sign of too little carbon, and hydrogen sulfide is a sign of too little air’ (response from an online toilet compost thread, cited in Vine, p. 411). In the case of compost toilets, there is no ‘demolition’ or ‘breakdown’ in infrastructure to speak of that renders the visibility of materials or infrastructures. Instead, residents are confronted with an accumulation of decay (Smith, 2018) and the co-mingling of materials (straw, sawdust and human excreta) with more-than-human microbes as part of their daily lives, thus demonstrating the sedimenting (stabilising) and transforming qualities of waste, even in sedimentary layers of the microbial. In this way, the compost toilet reveals how sedimentary layers of home possessions in the Anthropocene can be deeply individual, sensory and visceral – while entangled within wider (makeshift) infrastructures and natural systems. As one of Vine’s respondents observes, half-jokingly, he now ‘feels a jolt of guilt at the sound of a flushing toilet’ (p. 412).

Moreover, the compost toilet adds an ecological dimension to sedimentary layers of home possessions. This is evident in the case of Peter, who built his own house in Joshua Tree, replete with a compost toilet, solar panelled rooftops and a water-recycling system for pumping used washing machine water into the garden. Significantly, Peter describes his home through a discourse of ‘flow’:

Peter makes very little distinction in his account between what might meaningfully be called the natural or the social within the ecologies of everyday life; whether sawdust, nutrients, enthusiasm, or joy, the important thing is simply to flow. (p. 413)

This recalls Ingold’s articulation of following the ‘flow’ of things or ‘matter in movement, in flux, in variation’ (2012, p. 433). However, I would argue that Peter does not solely conceive of flow in terms of materials, but in the sedimentary intricacies and interconnectedness of objects, human agencies, natural cycles and infrastructures ­­­– such that material flows become etched into contours of the body: in the human ­– through the depositing of excreta; in the built environment – through sunk depressions in the earth to manage rainwater flows; in infrastructures ­– through solar panels and water-recycling systems. Together, these sedimentary layers co-respond in interconnected, complex webs of exchange such that the sedimented effect (Butler) is continuous flow: ‘Peter’s particular brand of everyday experimentation entails… [that] the cycling of matter and energy should never be interrupted’ (Vine, 2018, p. 412).

Thus, Vine’s analysis illuminates the importance of going beyond a vitalist approach to show how ordinary agencies and experimentation coalesce with materials to shape home possessions, architecture and ­– ultimately – new ways of ‘learning to feel at home in the Anthropocene’ (Vine, 2018).

Conclusion

Drawing from Veena Das (2007), Moroşanu observes that ‘our theoretical impulse is often to think of agency in terms of escaping the ordinary rather than as a descent into it’ (Veena Das, cited in Moroşanu, 2016, p. 7). A sedimentary, post-vitalist approach to home possessions destabilises the dialectic between object and thing to show how objects also take on a thing-like quality within a processual meshwork of ordinary agencies, infrastructures and everyday ecologies. Thus, the book enters the home not only as a ‘book’, but part and parcel of a growing ecological concern and appreciation amidst ‘a moment of blinking self-awareness, in which the human species is becoming conscious of itself as a planetary force’ (Blasdel, 2017).

As McMullen et. al (2019) note, ‘much scholarship on electronic waste (e-waste) emphasizes local to global flows and life cycles of waste… [but] less attention has been paid to the micro-practices that formulate the performative, affective and embodied experiences of electronic objects and e-waste in everyday lives’ (p. 2). In a similar way, I have sought to weave together ordinary agencies and micrological acts in my analysis, while revealing people’s growing awareness of the sedimentary, infrastructural and ecological underpinnings of home possessions. From junk drawers to compost toilets, residents have modulated the material flows of objects, conjuring contrapuntal rhythms of deferred disposal and flows of disposal in their everyday lives.

Thus, in peering at the sedimentary layers of home possessions, we see their histories as the ‘stuff of time’ (Ingold, 2012, p. 438) – and as present parts and parcels spilling over into the thresholds of the home and everyday living in the Anthropocene.

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