Oozing Matters: Infracycles of “Waste Management” and Emergent Naturecultures in Phnom Penh

Abstract

The Cambodian city of Phnom Penh displays a unique recyclable waste collection system. This article follows the daily practices of waste pickers and the movements of recyclable waste through the city. The hereby examined recurrent daily interactions define the overall infrastructure of recyclable waste handling that can be described as infracycles: sociomaterial constellations through which the quotidian flows of persons, goods, tools, narratives and ideas are organized in a recurrent and circular manner, thereby functioning as an actual lived infrastructure. This infrastructure is lived out bottom-up, as waste pickers, depot owners, and others interrelate. As waste circulates through cycles, different sociomaterialities emerge, which shape the city. Keeping the city somewhat clean, waste pickers form material itineraries and direct flows that shape urban ecologies. In the same process, oozy materials leaking from infracycles also create new versions of the city in the form of urban naturecultures, which compete with other imaginaries and designs for Phnom Penh’s urban transformation.

Keywords:

• Recyclable waste
• circularity
• infrastructure
• leakages
• natureculture

Acknowledgements

Foremost, I would like to thank all research participants for their openness towards my research project that I conducted in Phnom Penh. I am also grateful to Casper Bruun Jensen, the editor of this special issue “Material Itineraries: Urban Transformation and Activity Trails in Southeast Asian Cities” for his support and contributions to this article. Finally, I’d like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions that invited me to think further in different directions.

Notes

¹ Often also written as ad chais, or ad jais or etjais in Roman script.

² While China changed their waste buying policy at the beginning of 2018, and now refuses to continue to buy up all recyclable goods, especially from Western countries and Japan, and recover them, Cambodia’s flow of recyclables has presently remained untouched by the issue, insofar as only the minority of recyclables are reprocessed. It seems most likely that the world’s new garbage dump will be the Southeast Asian nations (Ellis-Petersen 2019; cf. Gerin 2018).

³ Clean waste materials in good condition and shape are favored by depots and ed jais risk the rejection of their collectives if they do not accord with the depot owner’s preconceptions.

⁴ This article was published posthumously and is unfortunately uncompleted. Beck differentiated in his keynote at the conference “Digitale Praxen” at Goethe-University Frankfurt between theories of praxis 1.0 to 3.0, where he highlighted the use of praxis as a verb, besides its usage as a substantive.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathrin Eitel

Kathrin Eitel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany. Following studies in anthropology, history and politics from universities in Heidelberg and Istanbul, she conducted ethnographic research on recycling infrastructures in Phnom Penh, Cambodia as part of her dissertation project. Kathrin Eitel is particularly interested in enviromental matters, resulting from human/non-human practices and emerging sociomaterialities in relation to infrastructures and ontologies in the field of anthropology and science and technology studies. She has written articles on waste, infrastructure, and urban environments and politics, traversing thus disciplinary boundaries.