Waste Pickers and Invisible Labor in the Infrastructure of Recyclable Waste in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

• In Event: Environmental Risks in Transnational Contexts II

Abstract

Waste is patterning streets and sewage systems in urban Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It’s omnipresent and pervasive. Waste pickers collect what they find valuable and sellable or reproducible from the ways and paths, looping around dirty and smelly quarters. Without Phnom Penh’s waste pickers, recyclable waste would sustain in streets. This infrastructure of recyclable waste is, as a lived infrastructure, highly visible in Phnom Penh’s streets and stands against Star’s assumption of break-down visibility of infrastructures (Bowker/Star 2000).

I argue, that even though this infrastructure is on the surface, physically in the streets of Phnom Penh, visible, it stays at the same time blurry and hidden, insofar as other citizens or policy don’t recognize them as a full-visible person with a “proper” and massively important job. Moreover, this infrastructural service stays unquestioned and is taken for granted. This leads me further to my assumption that not only infrastructures of recycling waste are sociocultural invisible but also the labor remains as a further aspect of it hidden.

Eventually, the network of multiple infrastructures on recyclable waste and the network within them are influenced by different actors, as it is waste and waste pickers but also labor (Marx/Dobb/Ryazanskaya 1981) and in the area of interactions between others (Barad 2007, Dolphijn/van der Tuin 2012). My contribution to STS is therefore to question the idea of infrastructure as a structure graspable from only one perspective/ontology. Secondly, I’d like to bring the aspect of (un-)human labor as an essential actor to let infrastructure function and live into account.

Methodologically I am using praxeographical approaches, ethnographical methods, like participant observation and interviews as well as mental maps and thick descriptions. Further, I’m following Star's (2016) suggestion on how to infrastructure and Larkin's (2013) inputs on politics and poetics of infrastructure.


Sources:
Barad, Karen (2007): Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke Univ. Press.
Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Susan Leigh Star (2000): Sorting Things Out. Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, Massachusetts u. a.: The MIT Press.
Dolphijn, Rick/van der Tuin, Iris (2012): New materialism. Interviews & cartographies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.
Larkin, Brian (2013): The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. In: Annual Review of Anthropology 42/1, 327–343.
Marx, Karl / Dobb, Maurice / Ryazanskaya, Salomea Wolfovna (1981): A contribution to the critique of polt̕ical economy. New York: International.
Star, Susan Leigh (2016): The Ethnography of Infrastructure. In: American Behavioral Scientist 43/3, 377–391.

Author

• Kathrin Eitel, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany