Anthropocenic Discards: Embodied Infrastructures and Uncanny Exposures at Dakar’s Dump

Abstract

Abstract This article examines ethnographically the embodied infrastructures of waste picking labour at Dakar’s dump, Mbeubeuss, as a lens into the material politics of disposability in the Anthropocene. Through examining the lifeworlds threatened with erasure by a World Bank‐funded project to modernise the dump, it interrogates the shifting dialectics of waste and value in an era of disposability urbanism. Specifically, the article examines the material, social, and spiritual infrastructures of waste picking to trace how the pickers forge value through their craft, expertise, and toil. Living with toxins allows them to pursue the good life and stake claims to an urban commons—but with violently uneven bodily burdens. It then explores the uncanny, often violent, consequences of state efforts to “valorise” dump economies as they enclose the commons and disrupt pickers’ ritual practices. The research extends understandings of infrastructure and offers new provocations for how socio‐material relationships may be revalued in the Anthropocene.

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