Panics over Plastics: A Matter of Belonging in Kenya

Abstract

ABSTRACT Anthropologists have shown how recent efforts to tell apart foreigners from autochthons have played out, often subtly disguised, in panics over objects that may seem trivial: “alien species” of fish, trees, or plants that endanger “local” nature. Little has been said about plastic's dominant position among these objects. In Samburu county, northern Kenya, “plastic boys” are unemployed men whom others despise for being unattached, “useless paupers,” who, not unlike plastic itself, have allegedly no capacity to grow roots and thrive. Analyzing this subject position against a wider background of objects and afflictions deemed “foreign”—including plastic bags, plastic rice, plastic hair, plastic smiles, and homosexuality as a “plastic pollutant”—I show how different troublesome objectifications of plastic resonate with one another and their wider context. I argue that panics over plastics and the politics of belonging shape one another, producing new, less‐obvious forms of inclusion and exclusion. [belonging, materiality, plastic, Samburu, Kenya]

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