The Anthropocene and the Culture of Flushing
Pluralizing the Anthropocene II
Pluralizing the Anthropocene II
Schedule: 3 pm (GMT, Lisbon Time)
The session will be in English
Events
will take place online. All welcome but registration required
Gonçalo SANTOS (Univ. de Coimbra) e Jun ZHANG (City U Hong Kong)
Moderador: Helena Freitas (CFE / Fundação de Serralves)
There is no
doubt that the environmental impact of the human planetary expansion reached
new levels with the rise of the modern industrial world and the “Great
Acceleration” that took place after World War II. In this talk, we make the
case that one of the
best ways to capture this catastrophic shift to an era of increasing anthropogenic
environmental uncertainties is to look at the
global spread of a system of human waste management based on flush toilets and centralised sewers. In the last two hundred years, this water-powered system
of waste disposal has become a core symbol of modern civilization and a basic requirement
of public sanitation in urban settings, but it is a very expensive solution
that cannot be afforded by all and has significant environmental costs. These
costs have become increasingly salient in the current age of environmental
uncertainties and increasing levels of water scarcity. At a time when the world
is facing a water crisis of gigantic proportions, it
is no longer clear whether it is a good thing to continue using water as a medium for the disposal of domestic—and
industrial—waste, especially when there is significant evidence pointing to the
limitations of existing sewage treatment technologies. The fact is that flushing away the problem does not solve the problem; it only compounds
it by moving it to another place and turning it into someone else’s problem. This
institutionalised culture of flushing and forgetting is not circumscribed to
matters of urban sanitation; it is a founding value of contemporary throwaway
economies and one of the key reasons why it is so difficult to challenge the
“take-make-waste” linear model of the world economy and its unsustainable assumption
that the planet has infinite resources. We link the
development of this unsustainable culture of flushing and forgetting to the
history of industrial capitalism and its increasingly wasteful practices of
production and consumption, and we draw on historical and ethnographic research
in China to show that it is possible to develop alternative models of human
waste management that help reduce the pressure on existing water resources,
while contributing to the creation of a more circular economy where
everything—including human waste—is recycled and resources are regenerated.
Related
Gonçalo D. SANTOS is an anthropologist and a leading international
scholar in the field of China studies. His research explores new approaches to
questions of modernity, subjectivity, and social, technological, and ecological
transformation in contemporary China. He is an assistant professor of
socio-cultural anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences and a Researcher
and Group Coordinator in the Research Center for Anthropology and Health (CIAS) at the
University of Coimbra. Prior to joining the University of Coimbra in 2020, he
held positions at the London School of Economics, the Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology, and the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Chinese Village
Life Today (University of
Washington Press, 2021) and the co-editor of Transforming
Patriarchy (University of Washington Press, 2017). His research
has been published in leading scientific journals in the fields of
anthropology, science and technology studies, and Asian studies. He is a member
of the Research Group on
Culture and Society, Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues,
at Georgetown University, and is the founder and the director of Sci-Tech Asia, a transnational research
network that focuses on the relations between technoscience, politics, and
society in Asia and around the world. He is interested in comparative
approaches that draw on Chinese and Asian perspectives and histories to
challenge the hegemonic power of Euro-American epistemologies and narratives of
modernity.