Juli Perczel (University of Cambridge)
| Dates: | 11 March 2024 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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Juli Perczel: Labouring for the dream of a circular world
Despite the extreme academic suspicion of the informal economy concept in the social sciences, it continues to be used as an unproblematic descriptor of particular spheres of production in the e-waste ecosystem in New Delhi, India. In this paper I trace ethnographically what people conceive of as informal and formal e-waste and how interlocutors narrativize these distinct spheres. Although academics have argued for decades about the utility of these concepts starting with Keith Hart’s characterisation of precarious labour conditions, the duality has taken hold in Indian policy discourse as well as everyday narratives. In the e-waste sphere “the informal” is a descriptor of a certain kind of labour, but it also goes beyond to refer to a distinct aesthetics and a toxic lifeworld associated with working class urban populations. In contrast, “the formal” increasingly refers to a corporate aesthetics and airconditioned lifestyles assumed by the upper middle class and upper castes indicating their developmentalist aspirations. In the context of the e-waste recycling startup that I conducted fieldwork with, “the informal” is only one of the most significant hindrances on the quest to establish circular economy. Other extra-legal practices like cronyism and bribing are not described as “informal” but are derided under the phrase “lack of level playing field.” Based on the ethnographic findings of a year-long ethnographic research I ask what purpose does it serve to define “the informal” in such a specific way. What kind of labour practices and aesthetic judgments does each sphere imply? How does the dichotomisation of these concepts reveal the dreamworld of limitless capitalist production and consumption? As the circular economy gains ground there are calls to assess what this multivalent concept means in practice. Most conceptualisations highlight the labour intensity of fundamental circular economy practices, reuse, refurbishing, repurposing, and recycling (Stahel 2016), yet this is complicated by the size and prominence of “the informal sector” in places like India and other parts of the Global South (Schröder, Anantharaman, and Anggraeni 2019). Based on the ethnographic material presented, I argue that circular economy may be a business model, a systemic transformation of production, or a calculative device, but it is also a sphere of imagination and speculation that produces waste as the next commodity frontier (Schindler and Demaria 2020).
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