A valuable life : seeing transformative practice among Phnom Penh's waste pickers

This thesis is a visual and textual ethnography about the lives of waste pickers on the Stueng Mean Chey Dumpsite in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Though much is presumed about the socio-economic situation of waste pickers in developing countries, this thesis seeks to dispel common stereotypes of picking being merely a means of survival for poor and transient populations, and provides detailed analysis of the economic and social situation of the people who worked on the dumpsite and lived in the nearby waste picker communities. By weaving together rich empirical research, embodying visuals and critical analysis, I highlight the pickers' agency, an effect seen in the choices that they made at the most mundane level when acting upon objects on the dumpsite, and at the most complex level in their relations with outsiders. Specifically, in drawing on the theoretical work of anthropologist Nancy Munn, I explore how positive and negative value and values were created through social actions of reclamation of discarded objects on the dumpsite, including an analysis of symbolic processes of ownership and the broader contestation of rights to an urban commons. In the capitalist recycling economy in which the waste pickers participated, the inseparability of their actions from the materiality and social life of the objects they acted on resulted in value transformation processes being enmeshed with politics of property relations. This study also highlights how their everyday acts on wasted objects manifested a distinct local social world governed by values regarded as important and significant for the community's sustainability. There was a visible yet often unspoken orientation by autonomous individuals to reinforce largely egalitarian communal values that enabled individual pickers to create and realise personal, social and economic value from waste. At the same time their acts on waste also created negative potentialities, most evident in acts to confront anomalies and prevent sickness and injury. Nevertheless these value creation processes were largely autonomous of outsiders. While the processes articulated closely with those of their recycling dealers, by and large, they cut across other value creation processes operating in different domains, some of which were fundamentally disconnected from that of the waste pickers. This is clearly represented in the stigma the waste pickers endured, their lowly status and the impact these devalued states had on intersubjective experiences with outsiders, including but not limited to aid workers, tourists and people seeking to attain merit who frequented the site. The waste pickers' communal value/s were further evidenced by their continued resilience in the face of ridicule and humiliation within wider processes of disarticulation, and their ability to largely maintain their values as others attempted to subvert them. As the Stueng Mean Chey Dumpsite closed during my fieldwork, the thesis concludes by exploring the transformations and interventions that impacted the waste pickers when a new sanitary landfill opened in the city