Waste and Waste Management

Abstract

Discard studies have demonstrated that waste is more than just a symptom of an all-too-human demand for meaning or a merely technical problem for sanitary engineers and public health officials. The afterlife of waste materials and processes of waste management reveal the centrality of transient and discarded things for questions of materiality and ontology and marginal and polluting labor and environmental justice movements, as well as for critiques of the exploitation and deferred promises of modernity and imperial formations. There is yet more waste will tell us, especially as more studies continue to document the many ways that our wastes are not only our problem, but become entangled with the lives of nonhuman creatures and the future of the planet we share.

What type of problem is waste in Egypt?

“…The literature on waste in anthropology is growing fast (see Reno ), but the question ‘what type of problem is waste?’ suggests quite a specific project for which there are relatively few emulable examples. For instance, two recent articles about waste in the Negev desert of Israel (McKee ) and Cairo (Winegar ) in my view treat waste and the discourses surrounding it in a different way, as having ‘practical value in a system of agency’ (Warnier : 187), to borrow a phrase from material culture.…”

“…A number of anthropologists and sociologists are now attempting to articulate the ways in which waste is at least more than just ‘matter out of place’. Their arguments include the idea that it is also a ‘concept out of order’ (Gille : 23), although that seems implicit, even integral in Douglas's original formulation, or that it is not just something out of place but also produces spatial relationships (Reno : 564) and phenomenological experiences of place (Reno ). Through the example of animal scat, Reno has also argued that poop is not MOOP, but ‘signs of life’ (Reno ).…”

“…A topic of growing interest in a variety of disciplines (e.g. Crang and Gregson ), waste is being worked on by anthropologists in many settings (Reno ), including Arab‐majority societies (outstanding work of the previous generation includes Jolé (, ); more recent examples, McKee () and Winegar ()), where several recent events underscore its particular significance: the 2016 ban on the production and distribution of plastic shopping bags in Morocco; the ‘trash crisis’ in Beirut, with its iconic images of rivers of waste broadcast on international media; the importance of trash clean up as a process of ‘aesthetic ordering’ after the Egyptian revolution (Winegar , ); or the public accumulations of waste that have proliferated in Tunisia, indexing post‐revolutionary political upheaval (dissolution of local councils previously responsible for waste management; falling budgets; public sector employment reform). Events such as these gather publics, telescoping seemingly local problems into vast movements of political contestation by instantiating state neglect (Fredericks ), bear witness to infrastructural collapse and transformation toward what geographers have termed ‘people as infrastructure’ (Simone ) and anthropologists ‘vital infrastructures of trash’ (Fredericks ), and underpin economies (Alexander and Reno ) as waste becomes a focus for coping tactics and labour in the context of financial crisis, leading to a rise in scavenging and informal recycling activities as well as innovative cultures of repair and reuse, as people seek to rekindle the value in discarded things and prolong objects’ usefulness beyond their usual lifespans.…”

“…The literature on waste in anthropology is growing fast (see Reno 2015), but the question 'what type of problem is waste?' suggests quite a specific project for which there are relatively few emulable examples.…”

Modes of governance in India's hydropower development

“…Documents in this kind of multilayered meshwork directly shape or reflect infrastructures. The focus on infrastructure as materiality has now caught hold in anthropology and social science more generally, with studies on physical networks, megaprojects, energy grids, and waste and sanitation, leading the field of inquiry. The engineering of river systems to meet energy, agriculture, and urban needs requires a complicated network of barrages, weirs, dams, tunnels, canals, pumping stations, and treatment facilities and all these components constitute a messy and high‐maintenance infrastructure that leaks, breaks down, or powers off .…”