The Future of Hiding

The Future of Hiding analyzes the territorial dimensions of secrecy and how concealment occurs in relation to energy infrastructure and identity politics in Eastern Estonia. It shows that secrets and hiding places are intrinsic to human affairs, while reconsidering the possibilities of relating ethnographically to what appears to be the extraneous. Francisco Martínez highlights how basements, garages, bunkers, holes, and cottages favor alternative forms of sociality, allowing local residents to redesign the terms of their public selves. Shadow spaces in this liminal region, at the border with Russia, are created against the institutional demand to be knowable. People engage in ordinary forms of ambivalence and refusal to negotiate a sense of loss and the consequences of a century of extractive activities. The Future of Hiding invites cross-disciplinary dialogue on topics like mining, transparency, belonging and cultural landscapes, offering insights into infrastructure's reproduction and destruction, recolonizations, and the ecological memory of a sacrificed area.

Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic research. His work is known for its critical insights and experimental style. He was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and currently works as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain.

The Future of Hiding demonstrates that the colonial character of extractivism is not that far past and not apart from modes of affiliation with the nation-state.

Giorgi Cheishvili, Tbilisi State University:

This original book transcends disciplinary boundaries to study topics ranging from colonialism to place-making, social organization, and identity formation.

Kiven Strohm, National University of Singapore:

Francisco Martínez craftly tells the stories of those lives that have refused visibility in the midst of post-socialist devaluations and demolitions.

Katie Kilroy-Marac, University of Toronto:

Methodologically innovative, theoretically sophisticated, and deeply evocative, modeling the very best of what ethnography has to offer.