[Linganth] Waste Siege

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins discusses her book, *Waste Siege: The Life of
Infrastructure in Palestine* with Hazal Corak on the CaMP anthropology blog
today.


https://campanthropology.org/


Best,

Ilana


Press blurb: *Waste Siege* offers an analysis unusual in the study of
Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic
context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of
waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to
negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial
rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of
resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of
daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West
Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday
life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing
Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers
how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities,
the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and
Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work
challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and
as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that
waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go."
Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes
a metaphor for our besieged planet.
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