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- Convenors:
-
Magdalena Craciun
(University of Bucharest)
Adam Drazin (University College London)
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- Discussant:
-
Krisztina Fehervary
(University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Friday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel invites contributions that focus on engagements with plastics, plastic objects and plastic debris, and enable the theoretical framing and ethnographical fleshing out of the life-enriching, life-saving and life-threatening realities of 'the Plasticene'.
Long Abstract:
We live in 'the Plasticene'. The term refers to a planetary epoch in which plastic impacts on the Earth's systems. It might not be as widespread in academic and popular parlance as 'the Anthropocene', but theoretically it undermines the anthropocentric perspective epitomised in the latter (Crist 2016). Plastic is the first man-made material to be mass-produced, its malleability and profitability ensuring its enthusiastic adoption and resulting in 'a thoroughly plasticized world' (Roberts 2013). However, its propensity to transform has changed it into a pollutant that harms molecules, bodies and environments, in known and yet to be known ways; and its durability and endurance have turned it into matter that accumulates, rather than decomposes, a 'techno-fossil' (Westermann 2019). How is 'the Plasticene' experienced and responded to by actors from different social milieus and cultural contexts? What sort of mundane actions (e.g. selective purchase, recycling) an awareness of living in this epoch generates? What kind of material interventions (e.g. reduction, recycling, innovation) it provokes? What kind of political mediations (e.g. eco-activism, governmental decisions, (inter)national policies) this awareness engenders? What kind of global networks and geopolitical agendas it produces? What kind of exchanges between humans and nonhumans it gives rise to? What do plastics continue to do? This panel invites contributions that focus on plastic, not only as a material, and enable the theoretical framing and ethnographical fleshing out of the life-enriching, life-saving and life-threatening realities of 'the Plasticene'.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 24 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
In Mongolia religious items are now frequently made from synthetics. This paper will look at how the imperishable materials used to make rituals offerings can cause these items to become trapped in an 'undead' state after use: unable to decompose but no longer accorded the esteem of a sacred object.
Paper long abstract:
In the presocialist period Mongolian Buddhist offerings were perishable. They were generally made from dairy products and other items that decompose, such as barley grains and prayer scarves made from silk. Where they were enduring, such as the rocks placed on the sacred rock cairns that stand atop Mongolia's mountain passes, they discoursed with invisible beings who would protect and assist in the procurement of good fortune for those who passed. In the contemporary period, religious items are often mass produced in China and are cheap and easy to purchase. Many ritual items are now made from materials which cannot decompose. Unlike the sacred rocks whose stability marks the sanctity of the landscape, store-bought imperishable items, such as polyester prayer scarves and food offerings wrapped in plastic, take on a new kind of materiality that lingers problematically. Distinct from ordinary waste, when Buddhist offerings resist entropy they can take on a new kind of status. Buddhist items that become imperishable can become powerful, potentially negatively altering the fortunes of those who mistreat them. As most Mongolian Buddhist rituals aim to purify spiritual contamination or the karmic results of bad actions, the synthetic materiality of sacred items has a complicating effect on these rituals: the process of carrying out ritual purification can itself lead to further pollution, both spiritually and materially. This paper will explore how the material properties of items used in Buddhist rituals can create ecological and spiritual contamination, complicating, inverting or reinforcing different understandings of their symbolic properties.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the use and role of plastic components in Ghanaian funerary contexts and investigates their agency as materials that contain death whilst always at risk of slipping into the status of waste, polluting the environment.
Paper long abstract:
In Peki, an Ewe town community in the Ghanaian Volta Region, funerals are very public events that bring the local community and diaspora together. The transformation of the dead, from social persona to ancestral presence, occurs in different sequences of events. These depend on communal evaluations on the cause of death and on the moral status of a deceased. In the process of re-making the dead as property of the living who can exist within acceptable limitations for ancestors or spirits, durable, synthetic and plastic-based materials play an important role. In contrast to organic, bodily or otherwise ephemeral materials, synthetics such as for example plastic ribbon and cellophane foil on grave wreaths provide a sense of containment and seem to defy strong physical change. At the same time, they are also auxiliary in stripping the dead from their former identities which can then be reconstructed in funerary and ritual processes. As such, plastic materials help to materially re-make the dead and hence carry positive values when deposited in or on graves as well as in the town's communal and natural environments. The paper will discuss the use and role of plastic components in funerary contexts and investigate their agency as materials that are contain death successfully whilst always at risk of slipping into the status of waste, polluting the environment.
Paper short abstract:
The Yami people of Orchid Island are stuck in a double-bind: the industry that brings them economic stability ravages to the island's ecosystems. Plastic waste has now become ubiquitous to Orchid Island's landscape. How are the islanders responding to this ecological transformation?
Paper long abstract:
Taiwan's attempt to integrate its indigenous population in state politics has also promoted their economic integration. The Yami people of Orchid Island - a small island located off the south-eastern tip of Taiwan - have been compelled to keep up with the state's modern economy. However, they now find themselves stuck in a double-bind: tourism has grown to become crucial to the island's economy, but is detrimental to its ecosystems. Tourists leave behind large quantities of waste after their holiday, polluting the landscape with plastic rubbish. On the other hand, islanders benefit from what the tourism industry brings to them financially. If they cease these economic activities, many will no longer be able to continue living a prosperous life on Orchid Island and would have to find better-paid work on the Taiwanese mainland. Nonetheless, some members of the community are trying to find creative ways to break out of this double-bind. Will they be sufficient to finally escape this dilemma?
In this panel, I will explore the transforming landscape and the Yami's changing relationship with nonhuman local species. I will also delve into the various ways that islanders perceive and respond to this dilemma. I will discuss my observations gathered during fieldwork on Orchid Island in June 2019.
Paper short abstract:
This paper offers insights into the timid demonisation of plastic in Romania, pointing out that contributors to this process, even through privately unconvinced of this negative portrayal, consider it a vital strategy for raising awareness in a country with a waste management problem.
Paper long abstract:
In Romania, a country with a waste management problem and lax waste legislation, the endurance of plastics is yet to be fully acknowledged and dealt with in a sustainable way. More recently, timid attempts have been made to raise awareness about the plastic waste crisis, ranging from exhibitions, the public shaming of retailers for their careless use of plastic packaging to programmes of ecological education and campaigns of collecting plastic waste. This paper focuses on the experiences and reflections of the initiators of such activities. They occupy a challenging position between consumers, whom appear insufficiently informed and/or interested, and to authorities, who seem content with the neoliberal model of environmental governance, which shifts responsibility for environmental protection/destruction onto consumers. The paper investigates the impact of the knowledge these initiators accumulate on their own conceptualisation of plastic, noting their mundane use and disposal of plastic objects, their revelations that plastic has its own agency and recycling is not the solution, and the dilemmas posed by their simultaneous involvement in the demonisation of plastic and recognition of the positive role this material might play in many domains and the pressure the plastic-free alternatives might put on natural resources. They come to see plastic not only as inert matter, beneficial or not, but also as animated matter, malevolent or not. Nevertheless, they consider the negative portrayal of plastic a vital strategy for encouraging a responsible engagement. The paper thus contributes to further nuancing the debate about the demonisation of plastic.
Paper short abstract:
Stemming from an ethnography within the fishing community of Setúbal, Portugal, this paper proposes to clarify some misconceptions that target fisheries as a main cause of plastic pollution. Furthermore, we aim to reflect on the impact that plastic materials has had on fishing communities.
Paper long abstract:
Plastic pollution is one of the most frequently reported environmental problems in recent years. Part of all the plastics produced still exist today in oceans, seas and coastal areas. Due to the visibility it gained on the busy beaches and docks of the coastlines, large awareness movements emerged, along with other civil society movements, concern of activists and the media, which put the problem on the agenda. We see it associated with climate change and considered equally urgent. This urgency has led to heated blaming speeches which hide historic tensions.
Starting from an ethnographic approach within the fishermen of Setúbal, we can understand the relationship of this community with the plastic pollution for which they are considered responsible for, being the target of awareness actions. At the same time, it will be possible to understand the daily impact of climate change and adaptation strategies. This ethnography aims to clarify misconceptions caused by heated discourses of environmentalists spreading across civil society through social networks, starting from the voices of fishermen and their experience with plastic in daily life, drawing attention to the vulnerability they face in the context of contemporary environmental, social, economic and cultural challenges
Thus, it will be possible this to think about plastic pollution in the context of this community, but also to reflect on the role that the insertion of plastic played in fishing communities, contributing to the destruction of their way of life, and as an added pressure on uncertainty they are in today.
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates the paradoxical imaginary of plastic as both a material of waste and toxicity and of progress and innovation, arguing that the cultural value attached to this material must be acknowledged and become part of analysis and understanding of what plastic is and does.
Paper long abstract:
Growing awareness of the harmful potential of plastic in environments and bodies worldwide suggests that plastic is increasingly seen as a material of waste. The 'Plasticene,' one of many spin-offs from contemporary Anthropocene debates, draws attention to plastic as a key material through which humans affect their environment. However, equating plastic with waste gives a one-sided view of the cultural significance that plastics can assume. Namely, plastic is also a material that is commonly associated with progress. This paper interrogates this paradoxical imaginary of plastic as both a material of toxicity and waste and of progress and innovation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in southeast Spain, where agriculture in plastic greenhouses (also plasticulture) signifies a complete landscape transformation from 'desert' to 'orchard' and from poverty to prosperity, I show how plastic mediates human-environment relations. In a landscape covered in plastic, translucent sheets separate inside from outside environments by regulating the movement of light, air, species and materials in and out of the greenhouse. Plastic plays a crucial role in modernisation narratives and can be identified as an important source of pride among farmers, while the image of plastic as a material of suffocation and toxicity also reflects on their farming practices. I argue that, in order to imagine a future in which the detrimental effects of plastic may be contained or even reduced, the cultural value attached to this material must be acknowledged and become part of analysis and understanding of what plastic is and does.
Paper short abstract:
As a pervasive, material element of the global, plastics raise potent questions. More than merely the 'stuff' of potential global prosperity, plastics are inscribed with varied cultural meanings. Here, I trace how plastics frame people as sharing responsibility for a particular global world.
Paper long abstract:
As a pervasive, material element of the global, plastics raise potent social and environmental questions. More than merely the 'stuff' of potential global prosperity, plastics are inscribed with varied cultural meanings. Here, I explore how global plastics frame an emergent socioecological crisis, tracing how plastics shape the ways people feel and think about themselves as sharing responsibility for a global world.
Plastics tend to be considered cheap and disposable, almost already the garbage they will likely become, following particular chains of production, use, and disposal that bring the global into being. In doing so, their production, exchange and disposal map people's inequitable global obligations to each other. Given the unanticipated effects plastics produce, the crisis needs not only technical fixes - new and better polymers, improved recycling systems, fewer mixed materials, and increased demand for recycled goods - but to reduce overall global reliance on plastics. Rejecting these materials requires people to not only undo the petroleum-based commodity chains that produce them, but reconsider their global social lives (Appadurai, 1996). Reviewing the new scholarship rethinking the broader meanings attached to plastics as foundational materials, I find that, rather than rejecting the global, the most promising social science solutions lie in enhancing its inherent plasticity. What emerges from the interdisciplinary global research on plastics are practices that reclaim globalism for ecology by developing an ethics of reciprocal global care founded on a new, affective material politics.
Paper short abstract:
This paper recounts stories of transformations of plastic and other matter, including foodstuffs that were the pre-cursor of early plastics.
Paper long abstract:
This study traces paradoxical stories of plastics as they get made and disposed of, drawing from the diverse connotations of their origins in matter that may be 'pure' or 'polluting'. These tales of 'plastic' transformations tell of materials that may be made from petroleum, black tar, or from milk, the white biotic source of life. They resist and accumulate but also decay and assimilate when made into various products, their material disintegrations being tales in themselves. The paper thinks plastics through a tale of origins, extending its discussion to the milk protein that is the source of casein plastic, showing that milk too is equally material and social, in its historical transformation from animal material to human food, and in the values and practices cohering round its decay. These 'plastic' tales, describe the entanglements of material and social forms, the transformation of matter with symmetrically unexpected reverberations in the social realm and vice versa. We explore the making of 'plastic' out of milk, by tracking milk plastics - trademarked variously as Casein, Erinoid, Lanital - through their material, cultural and social histories in milk - how different ideas about hygiene, bacteria, naturalness, and technology simultaneously transformed both milk, and milk plastics, as well as daily lives, through the consumption items they are made into, carrying this history to present day reincarnations of casein in bioplastics. To describe these entanglements of material and social forms, reflecting on the agentic capacities of non-humans in general we propose the term 'plastic agency'.