The Limits of Resilience: Managing Waste in the Racialized Anthropocene
Abstract
ABSTRACT Recent anthropological attention to more‐than‐human life has neglected the importance of race and racialization in human responses to environmental change. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with waste management institutions and Romani waste laborers in urban Bulgaria, this article invokes the concept of the racialized Anthropocene to destabilize the unmarked whiteness upon which the turn to humans‐as‐a‐species—anthropos—is founded. Habituation is central to both EU waste policy and the generative strategies Romani street sweepers use to manage accumulated waste and the conditions of their racialized labor. I call these creative and quotidian strategies anthropogenic management. Anthropogenic management disrupts the resiliency paradigm that has become commonplace in analyses of how people respond to circumstances not of their own making. As such, it bridges the Anthropocene, marked by waste accumulation at a planetary scale, with the everyday conditions of racialization through the embodied labor of managing other people's trash. [waste, labor, race, Bulgaria]
Cite this
Elana Resnick (2021). The Limits of Resilience: Managing Waste in the Racialized Anthropocene. American Anthropologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13542
@article{elana2021the,
title = {The Limits of Resilience: Managing Waste in the Racialized Anthropocene},
author = {Resnick, Elana},
year = {2021},
journal = {American Anthropologist},
doi = {10.1111/aman.13542}
}Citations in this library
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