Urban Dwellers, Politicians And Dirt: An Anthropology Of Everyday Governance In Bobo-Dioulasso (Burkina Faso)

Bouju, Jacky

doi:10.1163/ej.9789004171282.i-347.40

Cited by 15 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Recently, the work on sanitation has elaborated on hygiene and its connection to caste (Khanna and Das 2016; Lamba and Spears 2013; O'Reilly 2010). More broadly, the cultural concepts of dirtiness and cleanliness have also been explored at length in other geographical contexts (to mention a few, Bouju 2008;Campkin and Cox 2007;Drazin 2002;Dant and Bowles 2003;Geest 1998;Lizardo 2012;Smith 2008), most often either equating dirt to "matter out of place" (Douglas 1984) and "entropy" (Bateson 1987) or, occasionally, reading the materiality of dirt as the abject (Sartre 1984).…”

Section: Mud and Castementioning

confidence: 99%

The muddy semiotics of mud

Cortesi

2018

Journal of Political Ecology

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In North Bihar, mud ensures prosperity for farmers, but also materially signals the lower status from which their wives try to raise the family, even at the cost of risking their own and their children's lives. This article provides a semiotic analysis of mud, an ambiguous material in its physical combination of land and water, a substance with specific gendered and class dimensions, and a symbolic marker whose presence on bodies indexes their socio-political identity. The sensuous relationships that revolve around mud and the prejudices it indexes illuminate meanings of dirt within processes of environmental knowledge and risk. By attending to the semiotic processes through which we understand nature, this article suggests that mud naturalizes the discrimination at the origin of dirtiness.Historical and political circumstances, such as the progressive loosening of the links between caste and occupation, show that mud is not dirt, but it becomes dirt when other kinds of dirt lose their meaning.

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Section: Mud and Castementioning

confidence: 99%

The muddy semiotics of mud

Cortesi

2018

Journal of Political Ecology

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“…This assumption denies the historical experience of sanitary provisioning within urban locales of the global South (cf. Anderson ; Bouju ; McFarlane ). It equally obscures the vital engagement of social actors with waste and hygiene in the crafting of urban public space and political life (cf.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…22This perspective is articulated by Jacky Bouju (:159), who recognizes that recurring claims of “lack” regarding public sanitation usually hide political struggles and policy failures underwriting resource deprivation.…”

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confidence: 99%

Public things, excremental politics, and the infrastructure of bare life in Ghana's city of Tema

Chalfin

2014

American Ethnologist

169

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In Ghana's planned city of Tema, public toilets and sewerage systems are a formative terrain of urban political praxis giving tangible form to what Henri Lefebvre calls “the right to the city.” Revealing the political potentials and determinations of both waste and municipal infrastructure, excreta and the systems devised to contain and channel them serve as res publicae, or “public things.” At the same time they embody the inequities of bare life and biopolitical proscription in Tema's urban margins, waste management arrangements underwrite collective outlooks and entitlements and wrest a space for urban existence outside the grasp of state bureaucracies and political elites.

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Technomolecular flows in coastal cities: an anthropological approach to new materialist ethics of the anthropogenic microscale

Acosta

2024

Maritime Studies

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Urban life is crisscrossed and affected by events and matter in various scales, of which the microscopic has been only partly addressed in scholarship and policymaking. In this article, I propose that it is urgent to incorporate new materialist ethics for a better urban governance of technomolecular flows, that is the multiple ways anthropogenically induced microscopic elements are affecting cities. Chemicals, minerals, fungi, viruses, bacteria, and other forms of life and matter affect human and environmental health as well as the shape and materials of the built environment. Coastal cities are particularly prone to such flows of chemical-, mineral- and bio-materials because of their location between sea and land. Existing legal and institutional frameworks tend to lag behind the uses of microscopic elements by industry and urban dwellers. A new materialist ethics would help rethink institutional architectures and responses to existing entanglements and the emerging risks they pose.

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Urban Dwellers, Politicians And Dirt: An Anthropology Of Everyday Governance In Bobo-Dioulasso (Burkina Faso)

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

The muddy semiotics of mud

The muddy semiotics of mud

Public things, excremental politics, and the infrastructure of bare life in Ghana's city of Tema

Technomolecular flows in coastal cities: an anthropological approach to new materialist ethics of the anthropogenic microscale

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