Commentary in Current Anthropology

Daniel Sosna commented on paper 'Wandering Waste' by Maryam Dezhamkhooy

Maryam Dezhamkhooy published a brilliant paper entitled 'Wandering Waste: Informal Waste Work and the Externalization of People and Landscapes in Iran' in Current Anthropology. Daniel Sosna was among the scholars whose comments were published with the paper. Current Anthropology is a journal that has been encouraging scholarly debates in this special format for several decades. We think that this is one of the best ways to stimulate exchange of ideas. The immersion of several people into a single paper is a great vehicle for thinking. We are proud to be part of that and thank both Maryam Dezhamkhooy and the editors for the opportunity.

The paper is behind a paywall but the comment is available here:

Daniel Sosna
Department of Ecological Anthropology, Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Na Florenci 3, 110 00, Prague, Czechia (sosna@eu.cas.cz)

Dezhamkhooy’s paper is a welcome contribution to the rich interdisciplinary field of discard studies. The author focuses on the management of municipal solid waste, revealing its relationship to power and social hierarchy. This perspective, articulated most explicitly in various writings of Max Liboiron, suggests that one of the most productive ways of thinking with waste is based on tracing the way its relations enable power to thrive. Dezhamkhooy demonstrates how the logic of difference, the materiality of garbage, and the organization of space get mobilized to shape hierarchy among humans. The takeaway message that disposability goes hand-in-hand with inequality resonates well with the findings of studies from other parts of the world. Although I am sympathetic to the general direction of the author’s argumentation, I reflect here upon a few issues, namely the relationality of waste, the intensification of inequality, and non-market mechanisms associated with waste.

There are two aspects of the paper that I like. First, it provides insight into urbanization and its consequences from an Iranian perspective, which I find refreshing. Iran does not fit easily into established categories of thinking about the world order; it has extensive experience as an empire with all the associated intricacies of power, and it has a deep history of urban life that entails dealing with waste. The author’s approach enriches a notion of what global scholarship and writing may look like. Second, the paper describes the separation and placement of entities and processes that fit into what I call a magnetism of strangeness. This magnetism stems from the human propensity to classify and dispose of entities whose open-endedness is dangerous and must be controlled through placement. Dezhamkhooy shows how garbage, Afghan migrants, and informal practices generate spaces that are neither urban nor rural, seem to be marginal, but are, in fact, essential for the city of Tehran. The attraction among entities kept out of sight vis-à-vis the repulsion of the upper classes from such places demonstrates the forces that a magnetism of strangeness can set in motion.

While I embrace the author’s choice to include waste, people, and landscape in the analysis in an effort to understand the relations of difference and power that give birth to inequality, I missed a more nuanced way of thinking about relations and causality. The underlying line of reasoning seems to put waste with its materiality and agency into the center of attention. While waste can become a resource (“dirty gold” as the author says) and does affect bodies and the environment, its relationship to inequality is more complex. I am a bit troubled by this overemphasis on material agency, which perhaps illustrates Gille’s (2007, 17) critique of waste fetishism. It has become almost a truism in waste and discard studies that waste, as a category, is indeterminate. What is or is not waste is in the eye of the beholder, and a large body of literature demonstrates this. Imagining almost a causal arrow from waste to inequality seems like a shortcut. Waste itself is a product of various processes. Inequality affects how waste comes into being in the first place, semiotically speaking. Also, it is an entire set of relations, things, and processes that shapes inequality. Some of them – inheritance, cosmology, knowledge, and social capital – are far beyond the world described in this paper. Naturally, there is no way to satisfy all readers within the confines of one paper, but the argument here is too linear. The materiality of garbage and its agency likely represents only a piece of a larger puzzle of inequality, which is constructed via many dimensions ranging from the recognition of migrants as different to the conceptualization of property relations and access to waste infrastructures for garbage disposal.       

Given the evidence provided, the argument about the intensification of socio-economic gaps between groups of people could be more nuanced. On the one hand, the paper shows how delegating dirty work to the deprivileged part of the population increases inequality. On the other hand, the paper provides ethnographic details about practices that seem to do the opposite, namely the ways the upper classes are outsmarted using the strategies of those below them. The author describes how glass bottles for alcoholic beverages are informally recovered from garbage, refilled in underground workshops, and subsequently sold. It is an excellent demonstration of waste’s intricate lives, but the effect of such a practice on social inequality goes beyond the author’s observation that it transcends various borders. What seems crucial here is the ability to reverse the power relations. It is an example of the power of the weak. Mimesis of the original goods not only enables the extraction of financial value from the affluent, whose hypocrisy drives them to search for alcohol in the shadows, but it also gives them a taste of uncertainty concerning bodily harm. Waste pickers cannot predict the consequences of their filthy lives, any more than affluent drinkers can predict the concentration of methanol in the repackaged alcoholic beverages and the associated risk of losing their sight or even dying. Therefore, living with waste does not only feed inequality but also creates opportunities for challenging it, although the magnitude of the two modalities may differ.

One of the things that surprised me in this paper was the author’s emphasis on scavenging imagined solely via market logic. Informal work with garbage is depicted primarily as a source of income. Even when the author describes things too precious to be sold to the lords or to contractors, they are still sold to somebody else. Research on waste pickers and workers in other parts of the world shows that commodification is only one of the avenues to give new life to recovered things. They can be shared, exchanged as gifts, or consumed by scavengers. I missed this non-market dimension of living with waste in the paper. It could add another dimension to understanding inequality. Despite all the critical points, Dezhamkhooy’s paper represents a stimulating approach to the archaeological study of discard practices.   

References

Gille, Zsuzsa. 2007. From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: the Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.