Panel 1: Bodies: Labor, Abjection, and Intimacy

Disposability’s Limits: Making a Life through Waste in Urban Pakistan

Presenter: Waqas Butt, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto

Disposability has become a central paradigm for studying waste in the contemporary world. In these studies, the disposability framework was meant to both interrogate the relationship that persons have to material things, especially discarded commodities, as well as scrutinize the relative expendability of certain bodies and persons, specifically those engaging in waste work. At first glance, this paradigm seems applicable to Pakistan: low or non-caste groups are discriminated against and marginalized because they engage in a stigmatized form of labor—that is, waste work. Yet, is disposability an adequate paradigm for understanding the historical forms of violence and exclusion shaping the life trajectories of these workers? These low or non-caste groups are landless and mobile agricultural labor that have migrated to Lahore over several decades, settling on the city’s peripheries and finding themselves working with waste. Through a series of life histories, this paper explores how waste workers have leveraged access to a stigmatized form of work to gain access to land in an urbanizing landscape, while concurrently being enfolded into abject forms of poverty, especially through indebtedness and illness. This paper argues that disposability enacts two fundamental limits. First, though illuminating some aspects of workers’ life trajectories, it misrecognizes the ambivalent kinds of striving required to make a life through waste in urban Pakistan. And second, it obscures the racialized, gendered, classed, and in this instance, caste identities that are not so easily disposable and thus, remain indispensable to materializing historical forms of violence and exclusion through waste in our contemporary moment.

Keywords: disposability, labor, caste, urbanization, violence

Discard Studies, Scale, and the Racialized Anthropocene

Presenter: Elana Resnick, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara

Recent attention to more-than-human life and humans-as-a-species has largely resulted in an erasure of race and processes of racialization in analyses of human responses to environmental change. Drawing on three years of multi-scalar fieldwork with Romani women street sweepers, EU waste consultants, local governmental representatives, and NGO institutions in Sofia, Bulgaria, waste labor is central to forging an understanding of what I call the racialized anthropocene [Resnick, forthcoming]. Amidst shifting EU policies on waste management, Romani waste laborers employ strategies to both manage accumulated waste and the conditions of their racialized labor. These strategies comprise anthropogenic management, which bridges the anthropocene, marked by increased waste accumulation at a planetary level of scale, with everyday practices of “getting used to it” [da se svikna]. The “getting used to it” that Romani street sweepers do enables the not getting used to it that the rest of the Bulgarian population gets to experience. Using my ethnographic research in Bulgaria as its foundation, this paper focuses on the role of scale itself in the interdisciplinary study of waste especially as discard studies engages directly with anthropogenic change. In this paper I pose a series of questions (and responses): What is the role of waste labor in the (racialized) anthropocene? What potentials does discard studies have–with its multiple interdisciplinary and related scalar perspectives–for studying anthropogenic change and underlying assumptions of what constitutes the anthropocene? How might discard studies help to develop new scalar understandings of anthropogenic and climate change?

Keywords: Anthropocene, race, labor, scale, management

Cacas Ergo Sum: Disability, Toileting and the Neglect of Abject Care Work in Discard Studies (and Beyond)

Presenter: Joshua Reno, Associate Professor of Anthropology, State University of New York at Binghamton

There is a tendency in discard studies, and beyond, to regard so-called “post-human” approaches to waste as, at best, politically insufficient and, at worst, a distraction from more central issues, including racism, colonialism, injustice and toxicity. As part of a new book that endeavors to “crip anthropology,” this paper will consider the ostensibly universal practices of shitting and teaching others how to shit. Drawing on post-human approaches and others, personal experience, and the ethnographic record, I ask: What would it would mean to redefine humanity around fecal dependence and care? I will argue that the problem of humanity (and its inextricable connection to the category of animality) are thoroughly political, as well as interwoven with social justice, all over the world. In other words, by neglecting the problem of teaching others how to shit and cleaning up after them, the problem of the human is neglected as well.  Shitting ‘the right way’ is perceived, around the world, as necessary for becoming human and, beyond that, for dividing humans from non-humans and near-humans (e.g. pets). In those places regarded as ‘modern’ these practices are avoided through spatial segregation, through bathrooms and, ultimately, through the institutionalization of people who cannot shit without assistance. In this way, the avoidance of shit and shitting become driving forces toward the institutionalization and dehumanization of disabled persons in ways that are rarely openly acknowledged due to the avoidance of shitting in generic discourse about (in)humanity. This includes most scholars of shit, from Laporte to Van der Geest , who would sooner turn their back on the politics of assisted shitting, despite its environmental, bio-political dimensions, and — this paper will argue — the historical gendering and racialization of related care labor. 

Keywords: care, disability, defecation, (in)humanity, ableism

An Intimate Space: Gravity, Waste and the Spatial Orientation of Bodies

Presenter: Dr. Katerine Sammler , Helmholtz-Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB)

Analog habitats, like Biosphere 2 in the Arizona desert or Sealab I-III at the bottom of the ocean, are tightly engineered confines used to reproduce the human necessities of an earthly habitat. Similarly, space-stations, -ships and -suits are also sites that analogize the average physical conditions for human survival at various scales. Examining the physiological feat of maintaining life in these places draws a sharp focus to the relationship between the human body and its environment, the porous and circulatory matter that blurs any boundaries between habitant and habitat. These engineered spaces create a microcosm of urgent planetary concerns surrounding air and water resources, but also waste capture, storage, and elimination.

This paper explores NASA’s experience with managing biological operations and discharge wastes in low gravity environments. Without strong gravitational fields, liquids coalesce at the location they are created, instead of flowing down and away. Such excesses disrupt the orderly engineered environments and minutely monitored bodies of these techno-scientific endeavors. Analyzing astronaut tears, space gynecology, zero-g surgery, and NASA’s “space poop challenge” through feminist and new materialist literature, we seek to refigure the fragile relationships between fleshy bodies and planetary bodies, biomass and geomass. And by connecting to broader politics of gravity, spatial orientation, and the risks posed by our inability to get away from intimate wastes, we also attempt to offer insights towards, as David Valentine urges, “thinking humanness from elsewhere in the cosmos.” 

Keywords: gravity, bodies, waste, materiality, environment

The Poetics and Politics of Sticking

Presenter: Syantani Chatterjee, PhD. Candidate, Anthropology, Columbia University

How does an apparently odious, and potentially toxic place that appears to foreclose all possibilities other than failure, waste and death become an object of attachment for its residents? This article responds to this question by examining what residents call “stickiness” in a Mumbai neighborhood popularly called “Bombay’s Gas Chamber.” Once imagined and constructed as the city’s outside, Shivaji Nagar is now crisscrossed by the city’s busiest highways, dotted with petrochemical factories, and home to more than half a million residents. Although negatively valued by outsiders, residents suggest this neighborhood is a “sticky” place from which it is hard to extract oneself. During the course of my fieldwork, I heard many residents try to describe this sticky quality in different registers, be it the air that lingers on in every pore, or the chipchipāhat (stickiness) of the summer evening, or the history of discard that sticks to the objects regurgitated by the earth during the monsoons, or the glue-like attachment to their homes even in the face of frequent evictions, or the resilience of the neighborhood’s designation as the place where waste, death and failure reside. This stickiness is politically significant when deployed as a mode of self-understanding with regard to the durability of social and economic inequality within structures of power. By explicitly emphasizing both the poetics and politics emanating from this “gas chamber,” the article enquires into why residents articulate their experiences of living and laboring amidst toxicity in this neighborhood in the form of desire and ethics, rather than injury and necessity. The residents’ poetics and politics of “sticking” suggest that the slightly (and tolerably) poisoned body is increasingly not an exception, but rather the condition of possibility of life in various urban settings.

Keywords: South Asia, poetics, politics, toxic burdens, belonging