The Future of Hiding analyzes the territorial dimensions of secrecy and how concealment takes place in relation to energy infrastructure and identity politics in Eastern Estonia. 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