The romantic reframing of what used to be trash

Trash, anyone?

I don’t especially like it. I’m hardly the world’s most fastidious person, but I find even ordinary litter annoying from an aesthetic point of view, and while I can generally ignore small things like candy wrappers or paper cups, where it comes to real garbage my senses tend to revolt. Seeing kitchen garbage — and soiled diapers — strewn in the street is all the more annoying because it serves as a reminder that there are people who have so little consideration for others that they do this, and it obviously doesn’t matter to them at all.

Sure, there are laws against littering and dumping, but like most laws, such laws are for the law abiding. I don’t need a law to “deter” me from throwing my kitchen garbage in the street, so such laws are lost on me. Of course, for the kind of people who do throw their trash in the street, the laws are equally useless, for they are as undeterred as they are undeterrable. Moreover, the police tend not to enforce littering laws against the littering classes. It’s a question of priorities; police don’t want to squander time on “quality of life” issues. Not when there are plenty of opportunities to raise revenue ticketing affluent citizens going too fast on their way to work. The latter are much easier to deal with, and can be depended on to pay the fines that are the lifeblood of the system. This is easy to understand if you put yourself in the position of a cop. Who would you rather deal with? An affluent speeder who will take the ticket and drive away, or a bottom feeder who is unwilling even to toss his garbage into the nearest trash can and who might give you lice? Cops are human like the rest of us, and human nature being what it is, they want to make their jobs as easy as they can. They also have to answer to (and are judged by) those who outrank them, and whether these are precinct captains or clerks in the DAs office, a littering ticket issued against a hopeless loser (likely with previous Failures to Appear) is going to be seen as a lot more of an annoyance than a nice “clean” citation against a taxpaying citizen. And if he brings in the garbage-strewer for the unpaid previous tickets, not only does he mess up his nice clean patrol car, but he will be seen as overzealous and naive, in need of a talking to about “priorities.”

Wow. I got carried away there. You might think I was an anti-trash bigot or something. Actually, it’s just the unequal application of the law that annoys me. I would be willing to bet that 90% of the garbage in the street is thrown by a small minority of people who are enabled by the knowledge that nothing will happen to them.

However, this thinking can spread; here in the heavily-student areas of Ann Arbor, youthful tenants tend to have a lackadaisical attitude towards trash, as they also seem to have learned that nothing will happen to them, because their trash is someone else’s responsibility. Which it is; when students litter up their yards, their landlords get the citations. An unfair situation, but once again, who do you think is more likely to pay up? Still, there are realities that lead to another double standard of which I have complained before. This town has a prissy, even snooty, attitude where it comes to trash collection. Citizens are not supposed to mix recyclables with regular trash, and if there is too much trash in a container so that the lid does not close fully, the collectors are supposed to refuse to take it and put a notice tag on it explaining why. Except that students in these crowded rentals often have far more trash than will fit, and if the law were to be enforced evenly, the result would be trash all over the streets. And whether the landlord is ultimately considered responsible or not, this would lead to complaints, and it would be a public health issue. So as a practical matter, the fully-closed-bin rule tends not to be enforced against obvious multi-student rentals. I admit that much as I once resented this double standard, as a practical matter I would rather they do that than leave the trash to accumulate and spill all over the street.

The result is this:

I went out and took that picture this morning, and I will explain why later.

It’s noteworthy not because it’s trash, but because it has been there so long. (I have been walking by it for at least six weeks, and it has not occurred to any of the residents to simply pick it up and put it in the bin that they wheel out every week and park beside it.)

Anyway, I didn’t mean to write about trash in the street, but I was reminded of the general subject because an article about Very Important Political Trash reminded me of the more mundane stuff in my hood.

Very important trash? Can such things be? Bear with me.

From a political perspective, trash is a hard sell because no one likes it.

One of the problems with illegal immigration from Mexico involves massive amounts of trash strewn in once-pristine desert areas, such as Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. Over at least the past decade, this has been an issue on which nearly everyone could agree is bad. Environmentalists may be on the left, but they have been howling (justifiably, IMO) about the wanton environmental destruction:

The following (from various sources) are examples of the environmental impact:

“The thousands of undocumented immigrants who cross this border area from Mexico into the United States daily are taking a heavy toll on wildlife habitats and the species that live in southern Arizona, especially in our most critical wild lands, say natural resource managers. … Destruction of habitat and disturbance of wildlife are only part of the problem. Illegal crossers leave behind large amounts of litter, such as empty water jugs, old clothes, cans and bottles, and paper. Some border areas simply look like city dumps. … Compounding the problem of trash is the large amount of human biological waste that accumulates in staging areas or pickup points, especially near riparian zones.”

Arizona Wilderness Advocate, Winter 2003-04.
http://www.azwild.org/newsletter/2003_04_wildwatch.shtml

That’s just a small excerpt.

Human biological waste is a nice way of describing what another writer dares to call “feces“:

The beauty and majesty of the Sonoran Desert is something that can take your breath away. Now you might want to hold your breath…

The picture above is on an “illegal super-highway’, from Mexico to the USA(Tucson) used by human smugglers. It’s located in a wash, approximately 1.5 miles long, just south of Tucson, Arizona. The people who took the picture moved down the wash, expecting it to get better, but in fact, it got much worse, if that’s possible.

If a flood came, all of the trash would be washed into the river, and then into the sea.

It is estimated over 3,000 discarded backpacks are in this wash. There are also countless water containers, food wrappers, clothing, feces, including thousands of soiled baby diapers. Fresh footprints can allways be found leading into it.

The Sonoran Desert is being turned into a toxic land fill. This is more than an “immigration” issue. It’s an environmental disaster.

Here’s the accompanying picture:

Stuff like that is almost as hard a hard-sell as human feces, because no one likes to see natural areas being despoiled.

But hard-sell as this human waste piling up in a once-beautiful desert may be, there is a new movement afoot to sell it.

The idea is to reframe the trash as archeological artifacts, and send in “curators.” I would not have known about this had I not read about it as a local news item.

University of Michigan anthropologist Jason De Leon was inspired to start the Undocumented Migration Project after he came across the body of an unauthorized immigrant while doing fieldwork in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. The immigrant, a 41-year-old woman named Marisol, had died attempting to crawl up a steep hill north of the state’s border with Mexico according to a story published in Salon.

Artifacts collected from the resulting project are now on display in Ann Arbor as part of a small exhibition entitled State of Exception. The exhibition includes a number of desert backpacks found by De Leon, an assistant professor of anthropology at U-M, and his students.

According to the report in Salon, a curator at the Institute for the Humanities Gallery at Michigan named Amanda Krugliak encouraged De Leon to develop the exhibit after reading about his research.

They have a picture of an even larger pile — a virtual river — of what most of us would consider trash:

 

The exhibit is walking distance from me, but I have not yet had time to go and look at the “artifacts.” What fascinates an old codger like me is the thinking involved. In an article titled “Don’t call it ‘trash’,” the chief archaeologist (a Michigan professor) explains why the refuse strewn by illegal border crossers is actually “treasure”:

For him and the students involved with his project, the random refuse left behind in the southern Arizona desert by illegal immigrants moving north is an archaeological treasure trove.

De Leon, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, spoke at the High Country Conference Center as part of the Science Writers 2011 workshop held at NAU.

The subject of his talk was the materials left behind by illegal immigrants, and what they can tell archaeologists about who these men, women and children are as well as what they bring with them when coming to America.

“It’s very easy to just call it garbage, and most people do,” De Leon said. “But that’s just a narrow perspective on what this stuff actually means. I want to convince you that this is not just garbage: this is archaeology.”

No mention of the archaeological status of the feces. However, in what must be music to the ears of whatever government bureaucrats are charged with cleanup, the professor warns them against destruction of “archeological evidence”:

De Leon said the state and federal government need to be careful when doing clean-up activities so they do not accidentally destroy archaeological evidence.

Hey, if you’re going to reframe an issue, the best defense is a good offense.

All your trash artifacts are belong to us!

Lest anyone think that I’m just having fun linking fringy nonsense, this “archaeological research” has been seriously discussed on NPR, and at the Huffington Post, where skeptics like me are singled out for snark:

The project has received opposition from people who either want to simplistically characterize migrant artifacts as “trash” or those who are blatantly anti-immigrant. Even so, the project has has received funding from the National Science Foundation and is backed 100% by The University of Michigan.

While De Leon has been contacted by the Smithsonian as a possible venue for the first exhibit of artifacts, he hopes the premiere exhibit will be in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City with parts of the collection eventually repatriated to Mexico.

The Smithsonian is interested? Wow. That kind of respectability means it really and truly can’t be trash, can it?

Might I need to revise my outmoded and reactionary thinking?

As it turns out, the project is looking for helpers, and you can get college credit!

Are you interested in Latino immigration, anthropology, or archaeology? You can earn eight college credits while gaining practical experience in the study of sites and material culture involved in undocumented migration.

Get hands-on training in archaeological and ethnographic methods
Live and work in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona for five weeks
Observe first-hand many of the complex social, economic, and political issues surrounding undocumented migration by visiting federal deportation court and migrant shelters in Nogales, Mexico

Alas. For a variety of reasons I don’t think I can swing it. I might have loved digging through trash artifacts in the desert for college credit when I was a young student and had my parents’ money to spend, but the biggest problem at this point in my life is that it costs $4500 (not including airfare).

That’s just too expensive, and at my age I doubt I would qualify for a scholarship.

Besides, I hail from the old school, and I cling bitterly to the outmoded idea that archaeology involves the study of things that are old, even ancient. This is precisely the type of thinking the professor means to correct. With “science”!

From Salon’s glowing puff piece on the exhibit:

He stresses the scientific approach to the project, even though other anthropologists have been resistant to the project. “There has been a group that’s like, you know what, this is not archeology — this is not studying the remains of my Irish ancestors,” he told me. “But it’s the same exact thing; we don’t have the historical distance to be able to romanticize this stuff.”

Wait a minute. I’m not trying to romanticize anything here, but isn’t archaeology specifically intended as a study of the past? The very word “archaeology” denotes that which is ancient; the root word is arkhaios (“ancient”). Romanticizing ancient Irish graves or anything else in the past is not the point.

Anyway, who is romanticizing here? Is it academically or scientifically neutral to be exhibiting modern trash to make a political statement?

Here’s what one of the exhibitors says the exhibit is about:

That’s what the exhibition is really about — it’s about posing questions, about trying to say, look at what the American government is doing by to these people by forcing them to walk across the desert

How is it not “romanticizing” to promote the idea is that certain trash is not trash, but must now be considered “artifacts” in order to promote a sense of national shame?

“We” (the American people) are “forcing” people to walk across the desert, got that? That’s because the border patrol checkpoints at other areas mean that the illegal border crossers will be forced to use less-policed areas. A very interesting definition of “force,” to be sure — one evincing a highly political bias which no amount of lofty academic rhetoric about science and culture can conceal.

But what about the trash — I mean “artifacts” — in my neighborhood? I realize that they might not be seen as meriting the same attention as the remains of someone’s Irish ancestors, but why are they any less meritorious than the “artifacts” from the Arizona desert?

Let not it be said that I “don’t have the historical distance to be able to romanticize this stuff.”

Here’s a closer look at the artifacts I have discovered:

The above is a veritable treasure trove of what it is that constitutes the culture of student life at the University of Michigan.

While unfortunately (due to the passage of time and the ravages of nocturnal animals) we cannot take a full inventory of the kitchen garbage to ascertain their diet, what we do know is that this particular culture used electricity and may have encountered problems with the technology (hence the discarded cord), that they used “Kodiak” brand smokeless tobacco, drank lots of bottled water, and to energize themselves they used not only “Gatorade series 02 Performance,” but they particularly enjoyed a substance called “NEUROSONIC” which not only claims to supply “mental performance in every bottle,” but which actually costs more than beer. There is also an empty container that my research revealed had once held an HMDX Jam Wireless Portable Speaker, which means that these students were technologically sophisticated, and most likely not living in poverty.

But I don’t think my research is deserving of academic credit, much less a Ph.D.  The students’ apparent affluence might strike most people as too boring and commonplace to be worthy of serious scientific study. (Even their callused disregard of Ann Arbor’s rules against commingling trash with recyclables just doesn’t rise to a dramatic enough level to be considered culturally, um, interesting.)

All trash is not equal. Some trash is “better” than other trash.

Perhaps it would be better to study artifacts from a homeless camp. Ann Arbor had one which was shut down by the state, and I’m thinking there may be a real treasure trove there. There has already been a documentary on the subject, but I have not read about any archaeological research.

Who needs to fly to Arizona when there’s so much work to be done here?

MORE:  After writing this post, I decided to visit the exhibit, which consists of a collection of backpacks, and assorted trash left behind in the desert. It is supposed to be dramatic, but I didn’t find it so at all. Perhaps that’s because I don’t share the political perspectives of the exhibitors.

I also picked up a program for the exhibit, which is prefaced by a rather pompous “Curator’s Statement” comparing the exhibit to Genesis:

Working on this exhibition, I couldn’t help but think about the biblical Exodus and the objects and texts inherent to that story. It would seem there are those invested in these discoveries as proof the Exodus story is literal, and there are also disbelievers who seek proof that it isn’t at all.

Funny, but it didn’t make me think of the Exodus story at all. Nor did it remind me of the Holocaust, and I never would have said that had the curator not brought the issue up.

Is a backpack from the desert as affecting as a suitcase from the Holcaust, this exodus as poetic as another?

Um, no! A backpack dropped by someone illegally entering the United States is not as “affecting” as a suitcase stolen from Jews gassed to death by the Nazis, and anyone who would think they are in any way comparable either trivializes the Holocaust, of is some sort of sociopath.

Unbelievable.

These people have a right to their opinion, but this is a state university, and I have a problem with tax dollars being spent on errant nonsense.