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- Convenors:
-
Luca Rimoldi
(Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)
Marta Scaglioni (Cà Foscari University of Venice)
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- Discussant:
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Marco Gardini
(University of Pavia)
Short Abstract:
This panel wishes to stimulate the academic debate on waste management in Africa, and welcomes papers inquiring the political, historical, and economical aspects of the social lives of waste. We welcome bottom-up contributions based on fresh ethnographic material on the African continent.
Long Abstract:
This panel wishes to stimulate the academic debate on waste management in Africa, and welcomes papers inquiring the political, historical, and economical aspects of the social lives of waste. Adopting the critical lenses of anthropology, this panel wishes to embrace various themes related to waste production and management in the African continent.
This panel looks for ethnographic research dealing with 1. the material foundation of waste and its varying local cultural and social meanings; the broader imbrication of waste within legal and illegal transnational processes; 2. the work of waste pickers and of people employed in the waste management chain and the influence that their professional path has on their life trajectories and future expectations; 3. the comparative analysis of waste management in large- and medium-sized cities as crucial for the understanding of the effects and impact on the labor market, as well as the intersections between local and global practices and policies; the mapping of formal and informal work practices related to waste.
We welcome bottom-up contributions based on fresh ethnographic material on the African continent, from any scholarly and academic level. Multidisciplinary research and frameworks are particularly appreciated.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 July, 2024, -Isabelle Zundel (Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple, University of Bayreuth) Thoko Kaime (Chair of African Legal Studies)
Paper short abstract:
Malawi imposed a ban on thin plastics in 2015, but the policy was met with hostility by plastic manufacturers who took the government to court. As the country reconsiders its options, we outline the legal and policy framework available for pushing through this agenda from an ethnographic lens.
Paper long abstract:
Malawi imposed a ban on thin plastics in 2015 and became one of the first African countries to take up such a measure as a key policy to tackle plastic waste. Such a move was indeed long overdue, given the amount of thin plastic waste that was choking its myriad ecosystems due to poor waste management in both rural and urban localities. Malawi’s many rivers, lakes and land mass are littered with thin plastics which cause damage to livestock and aquatic organisms. However, despite such an urgent need, the policy was met with hostility by many plastic manufacturers who took the government to court. The initial suspension of the implementation of the Environment Management (Plastics) Regulations 2015 of the High Court has been challenged at the Supreme Court of Appeal.
As the country reconsiders its policy options in light of this setback and increasing commitment to global standards to reduce single-use plastic waste (SUP), we outline the legal and policy framework available for pushing through this agenda. The paper utilises evidence from surveys and focus group discussions undertaken amongst university students to gauge citizen appetite for regulatory changes in favour of proscribing SUPs. It further argues that piecemeal attacks against SUPs, such as thin plastics, will not yield the necessary results and that instead, a comprehensive framework that removes SUPs from circulation coupled with clean-up obligations on manufacturers is the only effective way forward. We outline the possibilities available in the current legal framework for achieving this result.
Riccardo Ciavolella (CNRS/EHESS)
Paper short abstract:
Relying on an ethnographic description of how people try to build earth from mud and waste in an amphibious environment in a lagoon area in southern Benin, this paper proposes a comparison between these two elements and a reflection on what they can tell us about living in a precarious world.
Paper long abstract:
Waste and mud seemed to be very different: Waste as the second life of things created, used and consumed by man and then revalued and reused; mud as a particular state of natural matter, mixing two apparently given and primarily natural elements, such as earth and water. But their comparison allows us to blur these boundaries. On an ontological level, waste and mud are both historical. They are the by-product of cycles and recycling, of the interaction and mutual action of human and natural forces. On the level of singularity, they are both transitory and unstable 'things', in that their reality is bound to change over time, but they are still permanent as inevitable and recurring agents in human life. Human beings both reject and need them.
These general reflections are based on an ethnographic fieldwork on the fringes of the urban world and on the banks of a West African lagoon environment. This is where the Toffinu, or water people, escaped slave raids and have since lived in an amphibious environment, in houses built on stilts. They try to rebuild their precarious pile dwelling by creating land through litter, using broken shards and shells, as in ancient times, and now waste, since their precarious neighbourhood has become a dumping ground for the urban world. But waste in water can only become land through a process of unstable silt formation. The paper then explores this complementarity of waste and mud through their social uses and cultural meanings.
Maciej Kurcz (Jagiellonian University in Kraków)
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the waste-antiquities and their presence in culture. It is based on ongoing ethnographic research in Sudan.
Paper long abstract:
In Sudan, since ancient times, the material remains of the past have served as a particular type of waste. They were sacred objects associated with cultural memory and group identity or reused for mystical rituals; they were brought back to life due to their practical use or sent outside the community's borders, treated as impure. We can also learn about these and other ways of treating and managing this type of waste from the "traditional" beliefs and customs of societies in today's Sudan. These methods, however, have had to change due to disruptions and crises caused by migrations, urbanization, political and ecological turmoils, and ecological disasters. The attitude of site communities towards remnants of the past can be significantly different, but it is far from indifferent. For urban migrants, women, youth and various wanderers, monuments are waste that is creatively reused in the doing and undoing of everyday practices.
The paper examines the relationship between people and ancient remains in modern Sudan. It focuses on waste-antiquities and their presence in culture. It is based on fresh material from ethnographic research linked to ongoing archaeological works in Soba – a city on the outskirts of Khartoum and in the village of Miseeda on the Third Cataract of the Nile. What can we learn from the examples from Sudan on waste management and conceptualization dynamics? Which epistemological, methodological and ethical challenges emerge? What benefits does it bring to build scientific bridges in multidisciplinary research on African waste management?
Amber Abrams (University of Cape Town)
Paper short abstract:
Surface waters, including storm-water are often considered waste water, but this paper provides insights on lived experiences of people working to incorporate such waste waters into everyday existence in regenerative and more sustainable ways.
Paper long abstract:
Water as an agent with agency is not new to anthropological thinking, nor is the reality that a lot of what we think of as waste can be used in other ways. This paper unpacks two areas of work at the Future Water research institute, University of Cape Town that intersect with undoing notions of wastewaters while acknowledging the agency of waters; that of a process of engagement, research and implementation into water sensitive design in a local neighborhood; and of research into resource recovery from waste and surface waters (often itself considered waste water). Thinking through human relations with waste/surface waters and working to develop pathways for more water resilient and just futures this paper outlines our process and provides a snapshot of the project, alongside feedback from project participants. We reflect on the ways in which perceptions about waste (or dirty) water can be undone, and how our efforts might reorient practices into new types of doing with waters. Critically reflecting on the project's transdisciplinary approach, this paper draw on anthropological perspectives around wastewater, water reuse and watery relations. Through an effort to undo and reimagine South African cities towards more water resilient, just and regenerative futures, we explore what dynamics emerge in the undoing of prevailing knowledges about waste/surface/storm waters in Cape Town, South Africa.
Jo-Ansie van Wyk (University of South Africa)
Paper short abstract:
South Africa's nuclear waste disposal facility, Vaalputs, became operational in 1986. However, local communities and their relation to the facility remains an enduring and understudied instance of nuclear necropolitics.
Paper long abstract:
Apartheid South Africa produced at least six nuclear bombs but dismantled its nuclear weapons programme by 1993 on the eve of the country's first democratic elections. Nuclear waste remains an enduring legacy of the apartheid era's techno-nationalism that fostered the country's nuclear ambitions. The country's only nuclear waste depository, Vaalputs, became operational in 1986. It is located in an arid, isolated and sparsely populated rural area of the country. Original scoping reports for the site predominantly ignored the presence of villages inhabited by, for example, descendants of the Khoi and so-called Coloured (mixed race) people. Moreover, research on these 16 villages and their inhabitants' relation to and engagement on nuclear waste remains scarce. Therefore, the paper intends to address this issue as an instance of nuclear necropolitics and a sacrifice zone. The paper also intends to achieve four objectives, namely to analyse the meaning and origins of Vaalputs, and community views on and engagement with nuclear waste and the nuclear facility. In the third instance, the paper intends to outline the myths and rituals associated with nuclear waste and the site, and the implications thereof. To achieve these objectives, the paper will apply Foucault's notion of biopolitics, Mbembe's notion of necropolitics and Alexis-Martin's notion of nuclear necropolitics.