The Future of Hiding explores secrecy in relation to energy infrastructure and identity politics in Eastern Estonia, connecting abstract concepts like hiding and opacity to tangible geopolitical and environmental issues.

The research highlights the way in which basements, garages, bunkers, and summer cottages favor alternative forms of sociality, allowing local residents to redesign the very terms of their public being in a condition of negative capability. Field research in this liminal region, at the border with Russia, provides a dearth of information about ecological memory, recolonization, and what does not disappear properly.

Therefore, this book expands the space for locating culture, politics, and the reproduction and destruction of infrastructure, showing, in turn, various strategies, such as refusal and concealment, used by individuals to navigate the consequences of an incomplete belonging and a century of extractive activities.

Content

• Preface: Calypso in the Shadows
• Introduction: Hiding in the Future
• 1. Keeping Things in the Dark
• 2. A Wound that Gives Off a Dark Light
• 3. New Hideouts for an Old Fear
• 4. The Social Laboratory
• 5. Interior Exteriorities
• 6. Left Behind Places
• 7. A Garage with a View
• 8. Crypto-Colonialism
• Conclusion: An Outside Inside

Endorsements

Hideouts, basements, garages—Martínez’s ethnographic attunement to “shadow spaces” in eastern Estonia offers readers an insightful glimpse into the sociality and enduring knowledge repertoires of a region simultaneously relegated to the margins and subjected to processes of recolonization via resource extraction. With its careful attention to the affective and material dimensions of everyday interactions with and in these liminal places, the book tells an intriguing story of memory, identity, and belonging in a post-socialist context. Indeed, The Future of Hiding is methodologically innovative, theoretically sophisticated, and deeply evocative, modeling the very best of what ethnography has to offer.
Katie Kilroy-Marac, University of Toronto

The Future of Hiding contributes to inform future approaches to secrecy and energy infrastructure as objects of scholarly inquiry. The book is both ethnographically rich and theoretically significant, extending an invitation for further cross-disciplinary dialogue on topics that are not often connected such as mining, transparency, and reified notions of the nation state. Through an innovative attention to social margins, it calls into question the essentialist understandings of identity and provides a careful account of the infrastructural dimensions of secrecy. This is a deeply humane ethnography, written with great sympathy for the people it describes and bearing the marks of a work matured by a decade of fieldwork.
Kiven Strohm, National University of Singapore

The Future of Hiding makes a significant contribution to our understanding of people, places, and things that are perceived as out of place and time, often relegated to a corner as disruptions to the social order. Drawing on ethnographic research in Eastern Estonia, a region considered residual within the country’s context, Martínez demonstrates that the colonial character of extractivism is not that far past. These elements of infrastructural harm stem from present forms of domination that dictate modes of affiliation with the nation-state and foster a pervasive sense of precarity and uncertainty.
Alina Jašina-Schäfer, University of Mainz

This original book examines how infrastructures are lived in the borderlands between Russia and the European Union. The ethnography offers a thought-provoking examination of the gradual decomposition of a long-disappeared polity—the Soviet Union. Drawing on fieldwork in Estonia—an area often overlooked, Martínez transcends disciplinary boundaries to study topics ranging from post-socialism and colonialism to place-making, social organization, and identity formation. His work is not only meticulously researched but also deeply engaging.
Giorgi Cheishvili, Tbilisi State University

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501784262/the-future-of-hiding/#bookTabs=1

Selected quotes

1. “By reconsidering what to hide and what to show, by selecting who can see what, and by refusing to be accountable according to the central gaze, we also become political … Based on six years of field research, it gives an account of shadow spaces and ordinary practices concerning concealment and refusal, exploring, in turn, how they play a role in the working of social order as the elastic adhesive that connects the parts and the whole” Pg. 23

2. “Fieldwork is like therapy: we can divide people into those who have done it and those who have not… In anthropology we try to understand other ways of being in the world by using the self as an instrument of knowledge… To present our knowledge, we describe relationships, tell stories, and create contexts as a way of understanding the human condition. Since the anthropologist’s knowledge is based on circumstantial evidence, we spend a long time in the field building connections and documenting an array of relations and firsthand experiences in order to produce a cultural understanding of the other. Indeed, the anthropologist is the kind of expert who secretly observes while being there, relies on the generosity of others, and combines living experience with analytical distancing.” Pgs. 10-11.

3. “Basements are technologies of the meantime, social machines through which the editing of one’s own life takes place… A basement is a social artifact all the way down; nothing we do therein is untouched by the norms and expectations of life upstairs”. P. 23; 27.

4. “The region is abundant in sacrificed zones, areas not intended for dwelling but needed for the provision and processing of natural resources—dark locations about which we don’t want to know, removed from view and easily ignored, despite our responsibility for their degradation. Pg. 15

5. “The legacies of extractivist colonialism are certainly an impossible inheritance, not simply unsettled but ultimately uncontainable, and they continue to shape horizons of expectation in the region”. Pg. 154

6. “Hideouts connect the private and the social by providing room for suspension and retreat… This ethnography accounts for precisely what seemingly does not fit in the present or refuses to be part of prevailing structures and representations… In shadow spaces, we find social realities that are disturbingly difficult to observe, thereby proving opaque to the methodologies we have developed”. Pg. 22

7. “The book contributes to analyses of contemporary decolonial processes, understanding the reasons why the perception of Russian speakers in eastern Estonia is not always aligned with the country’s value system; therefore, it shows that the critique of Russian aggressive imperialism does not prevent us from questioning the ethnocentric construction of the nation”. Pg. 23

8. “Identity is never something we find and then retain forever, but rather a dynamic ‘we’ that continually work through, sometimes publicly and visibly, and other times silently and in the shadows”. Pg. 160