Balad el-Ziblé (Country of Rubbish): Moral Geographies of Waste in Post-revolutionary Tunisia

ABSTRACT

Waste sullies, physically and morally, polluting people and places, and defining or altering their position within social and spatial hierarchies. Given this polluting quality and the moral charge of the idiom of pollution, waste and its distribution are indicative of how places are imbued with moral judgment and at the same time waste illustrates how places themselves can become morally polluting. In the context of a waste crisis that followed the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, it is argued here that an attention to waste as material and symbolic category demonstrates the recursive relationship between materials, people, their thoughts and actions, in the moralisation of place. Examining this waste crisis in terms of a Tunisian moral geography of waste, which was established under colonialism and labels certain people and places as clean and dirty, reveals the dynamic and historically contingent nature of moral spaces and depicts them as sites for socio-spatial struggles that in themselves illuminate the revolution in novel ways. Finally, it is concluded that the polluting quality of waste spilled over the boundaries of Tunisia’s moral geography to morally sully the whole time period and political process of Tunisia’s transition.

KEYWORDS:

• Waste
• morality
• place
• inequality
• revolution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Waste in the Tunisian Arabic dialect is most commonly referred to as masikh, dirt, and not as fadallat, a more technical term for waste employed by waste management agencies for example. Waste and dirt, despite having different but overlapping theoretical trajectories (see Reno 2015 for an overview) are used here interchangeably as both material entities and symbolic categories with high moral charge. This moral charge is even more clearly expressed in the idiom of khaamij, which in that mirrors the English word ‘filthy’.

2. Lee and Smith (2004, 6) define ‘moral geographies (“landscapes” or “locations”) as a rubric for a distinctive kind of thick descriptive ethics’. This view not only sees moralities as materially and spatially situated, which is essential for our understanding of morality in the context of waste and place, but it also depicts morality as a constructed through socio-spatial difference and inequality (2004, 8).

3. The term socio-spatial (socio-spatiale) or socio-territorial (socio-territoriale) inequality is commonly used by Tunisian academics and increasingly amongst NGOs and the media to talk about spatially arranged socio-economic, but also ecological disparities in their country. Going back to the urban planner Belhedi (1999) the term also historicises regional inequalities in development at least since colonial times. Finally, socio-spatial inequality here is often related to various forms of Tunisian regionalism.

4. Douglas’ works have been criticised for being too rigid in her opposition between order/ disorder, structure/ taboo (Meigs 1978) and for disregarding the material qualities of dirt (Hawkins 2006; Gregson et al. 2010).

5. This European moralising discourse expressed through the new conceptions of hygiene fell on fertile grounds in an Ottoman/ Islamic context that already conflated dirt with moral indecency and danger (Bouhdiba 1998) and where urban elites had a longstanding suspicion of rural populations (Vasile 1995).

6. Until recently government documents used the term naari7 (Internal migrator) a derogatory expression for rural migrants to the cities.

7. By 1966, two-thirds of Tunis’s population lived either in the medina or the gourbivilles (Micaud 1976, 138).

8. There is a large and varied body of literature on the distribution of waste management infrastructure and social marginalisation. See Rootes (2009) for an introduction.

9. For Tunisians, the negative conflation between morality and place is based in part on the perceived criminal and transgressive behaviors of the inhabitants of ‘dirty places’ —i.e. dirty places produce dirty people. The work of Merry (1981) however, disproves this association between dirty areas and crime in her ethnography of a Boston housing project. Here residents also perceived a run down, dirty, place — in her cases a decrepit playground — as the most dangerous part of their area. These perceptions didn't hold against crime statistics that Merry consulted. Crime statistics, as most statistics with political currency, are famously unreliable in Tunisia.

10. Muhawi (1996) writes that the negative stereotypes of Libyans in Tunisia have their origin in the economic inequality of the two countries because of Libya’s oil and the expulsion of Tunisian workers from the oil industry in the 1970s.

11. This use of garbage in a productive form of protest is in line with what several scholars have described as the material politics of waste, in which the either waste’s abject nature or its indefinability gives rise to a politics of waste (Hawkins 2006; Moore 2012).