TY - JOUR
T1 - Circularity and enclosures
T2 - Metabolizing waste with the black soldier fly
AU - Zhang, Amy
N1 - Funding Information:
This article would not have been possible without the generosity of Dr. Wu and his team in Guangzhou. Thanks to Paige West and Mark Moritz for their comments, along with Sarah Besky, Ashley Carse, Nicole Peterson, and Maryann Cairns who read this piece as a part of the 2016 Roy Rappaport Prize Committee. Earlier versions of the work benefited from generous readings and comments of Michael Dove, Dana Graef, Bruce Grant, Susan Greenhalgh, Karen Hébert, Emily Martin, Laura Martin, Andrea Muehlebach, Helen Siu, Shivi Sivaramakrishnan, Mei Zhan, Li Zhang, and Ling Zhang. I am grateful to both the previous and current editorial teams of Cultural Anthropology and the anonymous reviewers for their deep engagement and probing questions. Heather Paxson's reiterative edits and incisive comments proved critical for developing the central arguments. D'Arcy Saum read every draft from beginning to end. Versions of the article benefited from the following workshops and presentations: The Environmental History Working Group at Harvard, the Fairbank Center Environments in Asia Lecture series, the Biosocial Network Retreat, and the Center for Urban Environments (University of Toronto Mississauga). Field research was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation (#1225886).
Funding Information:
Acknowledgments This article would not have been possible without the generosity of Dr. Wu and his team in Guangzhou. Thanks to Paige West and Mark Moritz for their comments, along with Sarah Besky, Ashley Carse, Nicole Peterson, and Maryann Cairns who read this piece as a part of the 2016 Roy Rappaport Prize Committee. Earlier versions of the work benefited from generous readings and comments of Michael Dove, Dana Graef, Bruce Grant, Susan Greenhalgh, Karen Hébert, Emily Martin, Laura Martin, Andrea Muehlebach, Helen Siu, Shivi Sivaramakrishnan, Mei Zhan, Li Zhang, and Ling Zhang. I am grateful to both the previous and current editorial teams of Cultural Anthropology and the anonymous reviewers for their deep engagement and probing questions. Heather Paxson’s reiterative edits and incisive comments proved critical for developing the central arguments. D’Arcy Saum read every draft from beginning to end. Versions of the article benefited from the following workshops and presentations: The Environmental History Working Group at Harvard, the Fairbank Center Environments in Asia Lecture series, the Biosocial Network Retreat, and the Center for Urban Environments (University of Toronto Mississauga). Field research was supported by the Wen-ner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation (#1225886).
Publisher Copyright:
© American Anthropological Association 2020.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - This essay traces a scientific pilot project to transform the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) into a biotechnology to treat urban organic waste in accordance with the dominant cultural logics of an ecologically modern approach to waste management in contemporary China. A principle of urban waste management, circularity, and a spatial logic of urban living, enclosures, condition the scientific intervention that promises to harness animal metabolic labor as a biotechnology and a waste infrastructure that can be adapted to the urban ecologies of Guangzhou. While scientists emphasize the natural proclivities of insect metabolism to transform waste into value, my ethnographic research illustrates that the practice of aligning animal metabolism with urban metabolism is anything but natural or automatic. Together, circularity and enclosure, as guiding logics of waste management in Chinese ecological modernization, uphold a fiction of biocapital; they create the illusion that nature generates value and remediates environments without human intervention while mystifying and naturalizing the appropriation of nature and labor in the new green city.
AB - This essay traces a scientific pilot project to transform the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) into a biotechnology to treat urban organic waste in accordance with the dominant cultural logics of an ecologically modern approach to waste management in contemporary China. A principle of urban waste management, circularity, and a spatial logic of urban living, enclosures, condition the scientific intervention that promises to harness animal metabolic labor as a biotechnology and a waste infrastructure that can be adapted to the urban ecologies of Guangzhou. While scientists emphasize the natural proclivities of insect metabolism to transform waste into value, my ethnographic research illustrates that the practice of aligning animal metabolism with urban metabolism is anything but natural or automatic. Together, circularity and enclosure, as guiding logics of waste management in Chinese ecological modernization, uphold a fiction of biocapital; they create the illusion that nature generates value and remediates environments without human intervention while mystifying and naturalizing the appropriation of nature and labor in the new green city.
KW - Biocapital
KW - China
KW - Cities
KW - Metabolism
KW - Multispecies ethnography
KW - The circular economy
KW - Urban political ecology
KW - Waste
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85086410615&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85086410615&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.14506/ca35.1.08
DO - 10.14506/ca35.1.08
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85086410615
SN - 0886-7356
VL - 35
SP - 74
EP - 103
JO - Cultural Anthropology
JF - Cultural Anthropology
IS - 1
ER -