Waste temporalities and practices in India and Japan

Panel discussion with four scholars of Asia exploring how, when, and where matter transforms into waste, and how human and non-human relations and labour are shaped by the material presence and imaginaries of waste in India and Japan.

The Asia Dynamics Initiative and The Centre for the Contemporary Buddhist Studies are hosting a panel discussion to explore the practices and temporalities of waste across secular and religious contexts of India and Japan. The speakers will engage with the legal, political, medical, and social aspects of waste making, accumulation, and management to understand how human and non-human relations are shaped by the material presence of excess and waste. Human escalating consumption and its consequent material accumulation and conversion to waste become a site where various conflicting waste imaginaries and practices emerge. Through this panel discussion we seek to interrogate the moral politics, temporalities, and material processes of waste to understand how, when, and where waste happens and how it shapes people’s everyday existence. Four speakers and a roundtable discussion will explore these themes by focusing on specific case studies from India and Japan: from the waste entrepreneurs in India and the practices of managing and processing waste around sacred sites in Dharamsala to hording practices in Japan and food loss/waste in Buddhist ritual economies. Each speaker will present their case for 20 minutes before we move to a 30-minute discussion moderated by Stephen Christopher (Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies).

Programme

Speakers and their contributions

Gayatri Rathore

Gayatri Rathore is an urban ethnographer and postdoc researcher at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. I work on themes relating to waste circulation, labour, and repair economies. My research focuses on domestic and global flows of municipal and electronic waste and their revaluation through scrap economies in Jaipur and Delhi. My new research examines the role of technology in waste management and treatment. I hold a PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po.

Wastework and migration in India

Across India, state efforts to manage waste has the impact of enclosing waste commons and reinforcing the invisibilisation of migrant waste workers. Policies and treatment facilities, by trying to control environmental pollutants through capital-intensive, technologically driven processes, marginalizes waste laborers who are primarily lower caste, rural migrants and especially women. This presentation considers how waste policies in India have not only failed to stop environmental pollution but also had the unintended consequences of targeting the waste waste entrepreneurs who, against tremendous odds, have their livelihoods tied to this constrained economy. Their presence challenges the concept of a waste commons, of formal-informal binaries and of disguised wage labour. 

Fabio Gygi

Fabio Gygi is the Chair of the Japan Research Centre and a senior lecturer in anthropology at SOAS, University of London. He is interested in the intersection of material culture and medical anthropology, with a focus on how medical and social categories are formed around practices of disposal. He is the co-editor of ‘The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan’ and has written about animism, dolls, robots, and Marie Kondō. His most recent publications are ‘Falling in and out of Love with Stuff: Affective Affordance and Horizontal Transcendence in Styles of Decluttering in Japan’ (Japanese Studies) and ’The Afterlife of Dolls: On the Productive Death of Terminal Commodities” (Ars Orientalis).

When is waste? Temporal Horizons and the Death of Objects in Contemporary Japan

Since its inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), 'Hoarding Disorder' has become the chief international language of addressing problems of domestic accumulation. Hoarders are generally presented/imagined/feared as filling their homes with worthless or dirty objects in ways that are anti-social, abnormal, and even dangerous. What is left out in these accounts is the complex entanglement of the lives of objects with the lives of people. By shifting our analytic attention away from defining the accumulated things as worthless waste and towards the temporal horizon of possessions - by shifting the question from "What is waste?" to "When is waste?" - this paper explores the daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms of consumption in contemporary Japan. By following objects on their trajectory in and out of households, my aim is to understand hoarding as a problem of interrupted flow.

Trine Brox

Trine Brox is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Buddhist Studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has written extensively about Tibetan worlds, including the monograph Tibetan Democracy (2016). Brox specializes in contemporary Tibetan Buddhism with topics such as aesthetics, materials and materiality, consumption, and waste. She has co-edited the ground-breaking books Buddhism and Waste (2022) and Buddhism and Business (2020) with Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg, and the special issue Plastic Asia in The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies with Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko. As the PI of the international, collaborative project WASTE funded by the Velux Fonden, which aims to understand the importance and role of religion in the generation and interpretation of waste, Brox is currently engaged in understanding the different materials, imaginaries, and trajectories of the stuff that constitute contemporary Buddhism.

Dumping waste in Divine Dharamshala

Dharamshala, located southwest of the Dhauladhar ranges in the foothills of the Indian Himalayan state Himachal Pradesh, is branded as the tranquil holiday destination “Divine Dharamshala.” It is not only “divine” in the spiritual sense with its many Hindu and Buddhist temples but also divine due to its stunning scenery with lush forests and spectacular mountains. Disturbing this image and experience, however, is the overwhelming presence of waste. It is everywhere. It is abandoned on the streets, swept in piles, spills out of lorries, and wheelbarrows, and clogs up the open gutters. It is tossed out of the windows of passing cars and dumped in the jungle in the dark of the night. It is moved up in the treetops by monkeys, torn apart by stray dogs, and munched upon by cows. In my presentation, I discuss Smart City interventions to manage waste in “Divine Dharamshala,” with a particular focus on a waste dumping hotspot located by the entrance to the popular circumambulation path encircling the Dalai Lama’s residence and temple in Upper Dharamshala.

Paulina Kolata

Paulina Kolata is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies within the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She has recently revised her doctoral thesis into a book manuscript titled Belonging in Troubled Times: Buddhism and Depopulation in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawaii Press) where she documents post-growth survival of Buddhist temple communities in regional Japan. In her current research, she focuses on Buddhist excess that such post-growth temple economies generate. She has written about food practices, Buddhist value economies, religious labour, and heritage, and her current research interests focus on Buddhist economies and the environmental impacts of religious practice.

Eating through excess in Japanese Buddhist temple communities

Food is one of the most common donations in Buddhism and it is meant to be consumed by temple priests, their families, and temple communities on behalf of the buddhas. As offerings, food becomes incorporated into the Buddhist value economies of meritorious giving and becomes charged with spiritual value. By tracing how food circulates through Buddhist ritual economies, I will explore how and when food donations generate the excess of edible gifts. In depopulating communities struggling with the seasonal overproduction of food, such gifts become particularly troublesome. In accumulation, they are both markers of spiritual potency and material excess. Almost half of Japan’s estimated five million metric tons of food waste is generated annually in household kitchens, including Buddhist temple kitchens. By asking how food excess is managed in Buddhist temples, I map out what, when, and where can morally become waste and consider the importance of Buddhist edible gifts for the wider issues of food waste, consumption, recycling, and aspirational non-waste economies in contemporary Japan.