Plastics and the Anthropocene: The Bads Associated with the Goods We Consume
Name of applicant
Gauri Pathak
Institution
Aarhus University
Amount
DKK 3,720,090
Year
2020
Type of grant
Semper Ardens: Accelerate
What?
Plastic pollution is a pressing global concern, and there is an urgent need for research into the sociocultural dimensions of plastic use and disposal. Examining how risks related to plastics are experienced, thought about, and responded to in different contexts is crucial to our theoretical and practical understanding of the interactions between bodies, environments, and toxicity in the Anthropocene. This research project aims to address that need by exploring what people in urban and rural India, Indonesia, and the Philippines find to be the benefits and risks of using plastic food containers and bottles and what they find to be the advantages, risks, and constraints of different methods of disposing of the resulting plastic wastes, with particular focus on the open burning of wastes.
Why?
This project is located at the cutting-edge of anthropological research on the far-ranging impact of plastics on health-environment systems. It will bring science and technology studies (STS) on plastics in dialogue with an emerging body of medical anthropological work on how toxic chemicals make complicated demands on human bodies. Most studies of toxicity and human-environmental health have been situated in the Global North, and the study of plastics as a material related to yet distinct from these chemicals is largely missing. This project will augment that literature with a focus on people's concerns about the toxicity of plastics in the Global South, and it will promote an anthropology of plastics that lies at the intersection of environmental and medical anthropology and STS.
How?
The project will involve partnering with universities in the Netherlands, the USA, Indonesia, and the Philippines to build Global North-South bridges and to launch the first global research network on an anthropology of plastics. Ethnographic fieldwork consisting of participant-observation, observation, and interviews will be conducted in Indonesia and the Philippines (which feature high on the list of countries contributing to marine plastics) and in India (which has committed to becoming single-use plastic free by 2022). The project will build on my earlier work, which has made the case for an anthropology of plastics as having urgent ecological and health relevance, and will also engage junior researchers to further develop this research field.