‘That’s What Fishers Do Now, We Collect Rubbish’: The Making of Environmental Subjects in A Human-Disturbed Environment in Rio de Janeiro

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the productive potential of waste and the emergence of environmental subjects in an urban fishing community, which I call The Colony, in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The shift to an environmental form of governance in the 1990s transformed its surrounding mangrove swamp into a product of policies and changed people’s perception of material waste. If on the one hand discarded materials made it almost impossible for traditional fishers to maintain their livelihoods, on the other, undesirable outcomes of development enabled survival in capitalist ruins. Waste is not only a big bone of contention; it is a political stake with social, economic and environmental implications. In the process, waste is re-socialised and discourses are re-clad according to personal, ideological and political interests. I argue that the afterlife of waste is found in its potential productivity, in particular, in its capacity to produce relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Waste
• human-disturbed environments
• environmental subjects
• fishers
• environmental governance

Acknowledgements

This article is dedicated to all those who work with waste and other 'impure' substances  at the Colony, and in particular, to the makers of the Bahiana costumes for the 2012 carnival. I am grateful to Professor Peter Wade and Professor Penny Harvey, who gave insightful comments for an early version of this paper. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers from Ethnos for their critical feedback, and their helpful and thorough comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Luciana Lang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7598-6949

Notes

1 Petrobrás, a national oil corporation, was one of a number of national and multinational oil companies that started operating at different times. Shell, for example, has been operating in Brazil since 1913.

2 With elements of the African-rooted Candomblé, Indigenous cosmology, Catholicism and Kardecism, Umbanda’s spiritual realm is peopled by guides whose influences encompass Yoruba, Gêge, Ketu and Angola traditions, Catholic saints, occultist symbols, and urban myths.

3 Ilha do Governador has a vice-city mayor who works alongside the mayor of Rio de Janeiro.

4 Municipal Company for Urban Cleaning.