Materialities meet the mangle: Electronic waste scavenging in Japan and China

Abstract

Ethnographic portrayals herein of zones of intensive ruination and material conversion foreground the mutable artefacts within environments and their human and nonhuman implications. In highlighting the toxicity of ravaged sites such as post-tsunami Japan and a South China electronic-waste scavenging hotspot, called Guiyu, the article critiques the 'vibrant' materiality promoted by 'new materialist' geographers and others, who tend to neglect the hazardous environmental health externalities of material conversions. The analysis here centres on trade in electronic waste (a.k.a. 'e-waste' or WEEE). In communicating the labile materialities of e-waste artefacts as they both drive and transform such sites of ruination and scavenging, this ethnographic account of disarticulation and rearticulation offers an opportunity to consider the 'enmeshed processes' of objects and the apparatuses that both destroy and (re)produce them. To this end, the article asks geographers to imagine objects in emergent sociocultural milieux as already disintegrated. Such an approach can not only facilitate analysis of sites of disarticulation—with their capacity for new formations—but also help ethnographers understand how ruination influences informants' conception of surroundings and their practice within them.