Paper short abstract:

I describe how Nicaraguan hygienists work with health certificate applicants to improvise methods for collecting and anlyzing human waste.

Paper long abstract:

The department of hygiene in Nicaragua's Ministry of Health is responsible for processing all health certificate applications. Anyone who is formally employed in Nicaragua's food, service, or hospitality sector must possess such a certificate. Part of the certification process is a fecal exam. In this paper, I draw on fieldwork conducted with Nicaraguan state hygienists and discuss the communicative and material labor that goes into harvesting and processing human waste. Given the scarcity of laboratory resources in Nicaragua's health sector, the collection and processing of waste requires that certificate applicants provide their own containers. These re-purposed containers become temporary parts of Nicaragua's public health infrastructure. In order to help applicants turn glass jars and plastic tiffins into suitable fecal transport devices, hygienists draw on a wide repertoire of jokes, intimate knowledge of household economies, and basic microbial biology. Drawing on the work of Julie Livingston, I argue that the 'improvisation' of fecal containment in Nicaragua shows how public health workers, well aware of strict global standards for hygienic measurement, approach shit not with repulsion but with pragmatic skill. For the anthropology of global health, attending to improvised tactics for containing and analysing shit affords a novel understanding of health bureaucracies, which are often depicted as sites for the strict arbitration of purity and pollution. I argue that in Nicaragua, health bureaucracy is instead a 'crafted' result of embedded social and material relations.