Filthy Flourishing

Abstract

Thousands of marabou storks occupy Kampala, nesting in the city's green spaces and eating up to 2 kilos of organic matter daily, mostly rotting garbage found in the city's open dumps. Weedy birds, they flourish amid Kampala's garbage crisis. Storks are both waste infrastructure and waste themselves, rendered disposable by the same state-centric views of infrastructure that make informal waste pickers precarious, and cast out from the imaginary of a clean, green, urban future. Theorizing animal and informal infrastructures together as "para-sites," this paper follows marabou storks through Kampala's ever-shifting waste frontier: the postconsumer equivalent to the extractive frontier that subtends the capitalist fantasy of endless growth. Kampala's topography, hydrology, and class structure ensure that trash flows downhill, accumulating in slums where it leads to flooding and outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other waterborne illnesses as well as to endemic malaria. Waste with wings, marabou storks remake the urban waste landscape, undermining efforts to stabilize the city's ultimate sinks in landfills, slums, and wetlands as they flourish in filth and defecate in the heart of greenness.

Technics of Labor: Productivism, Expertise, and Solid Waste Management in a Public‐Private Partnership

“…Take, for instance, the kind of work analyzed in this article—waste work. While the article analyzed the everyday work and social relations among sanitation workers and supervisors, there are numerous moments that could be located in the labor process of this form of work and its social relations—from the domestic work performed by female workers or kin to non‐humans laboring symbiotically with waste materials and infrastructures (Doherty 2019). What these moments in the labor process of waste work underscore is the instability of work as a category of action.…”

The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019

“…The contributors to the special issue model the methodological intervention of the patch with admirable ethnographic texture (see also Brown 2019; Viveiros de Castro 2019; Dove 2019; Ficek 2019; Hadfield and Haraway 2019; Keck 2019; Khan 2019; Morita and Suzuki 2019; Perfecto, Jiménez‐Soto, and Vandermeer 2019; Tsai 2019). These perspectives detail, for example, Alaskan salmon population biology as a genre of claims making in which damage to nonhuman ecosystems establishes the grounds of repair for the ongoing violence of settler colonialism (Swanson 2019), landfills in Kampala as sites of subsistence livelihoods for informal waste collectors and marabou storks afflicted by common regimes of displacement and disposability (Doherty 2019), and productive entanglements between human and nonhuman species in the farming landscapes of Yilan, Taiwan, as the foundation of a politics that extends outside the market values of industrial agribusiness (Tsai 2019). In each instance, anthropology is pushed beyond a classical orientation toward anthropos through entanglements of human and nonhuman worlds that proliferate beyond arbitrary municipal and juridical borders.…”

Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology

“…Take the marabou storks that in recent years have begun to multiply in Kampala, the sprawling capital of Uganda (Doherty 2019). The storks have given up their seasonal migration routes and have instead begun to permanently occupy trees across the city.…”

“…Patches show us histories of genocide, displacement, exploitation, and oppression-together with the ecological consequences of these programs. All the papers in this special issue address human inequalities: cattle push forward Anthropocene colonization, with its genocidal practices (Ficek 2019); smallholders' perspectives on plant life are systematically erased in Southeast Asia (Dove 2019); Ugandan garbage pickers work alongside birds to find their livelihoods in the ruins (Doherty 2019). Several papers address how scholars might get enough distance from still-hegemonic frameworks of progress, modernization, and growth to avoid their unjust exclusions.…”