Chasing 'Wonders': Textures and Infrastructures of Circular Economies in Cambodia

Abstract

Imagine a world in which sewage can become drinking water, food scraps can end up back on your dinner table as a nutritious meal, waste never ends up in landfill, resources are never exhausted. Such a wondrous world is not far from the future. The circular economy model is designed to realize this vision by eliminating waste, promoting material reuse, and regenerating nature. Chasing 'Wonder' seeks to reimagine the circular economy by exploring what makes this model appealing and what is at stake when such a wondrous world fails to materialize. It argues that circular economies are multiple fantastical projects that are continually being made and remade.

Based on year-long multi-sited ethnographic research in Cambodia, this study traces different emerging forms of circular economies, from a black soldier fly farm to a wastewater treatment project. In the absence of reliable waste infrastructure in Cambodia, the circular economy model is increasingly promoted by the government as an alternative waste management solution. In examining how different grassroot initiatives design waste infrastructures to enact circular economies, this study reveals the lives that are inadvertently embroiled in such circular endeavours. Much of the anthropological literature has critically challenged the circular economy model for operating as growth-driven capitalism writ large. What remains under-examined and conceptualized is how certain imaginaries of circular economies take hold and become diverging more-than-human sites of constraints, predicaments, and/or possibilities for different waste actors.

Chasing 'Wonder' provides an alternative ethnographic account by charting out these divergences and the varying allures and effects of the ever-transforming circular economies. It offers an innovative contribution by bringing the anthropology of waste into conversation with science and technology studies, feminist new materialisms, and disability studies. Such an approach enables us to re-examine the seemingly wondrous circular economies by foregrounding their textures, inconsistencies, and multi-edged ramifications. Show more