déchets. stigmatisations, commerces, politiques ... - Viva Rio en Haiti

1. INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this text is to offer a panoramic
view of the social universe of waste in a poor and
degraded area of the metropolitan zone of Port-au-
Prince (Haiti), inhabited by approximately 100,000
people. 1 The text is based on the fi ndings of a research
project on Haitian markets (NuCEC, Postgraduate
Program in Social Anthropology, Museu
Nacional, UFRJ), linked to the ‘Economy, Currency,
Market’ Laboratory of the Institut Interuniversitaire
de Recherche et Développement (INURED,
Haiti). 2 It also responds to a request from the Brazilian
NGO Viva Rio (VR), which has been working
in Port-au-Prince in the Greater Bel Air region
since 2006 (including, from 2008 onwards, a part
bordering the municipality of Cité Soleil), promoting
initiatives designed to stabilize and improve
the urban infrastructure, particularly in terms of
water supplies, healthcare, sanitation and garbage
disposal and treatment.
Analyzing the social universe of garbage allows
us to tackle three important issues in the
structuring of contemporary Haiti: (1) the dynamic
behind the production of social inequalities and
differences and the perceptions associated with
these, (2) the political dynamic (in general and
public policies in particular) formed on the boundary
between the action of state institutions, international
cooperation agencies and NGOs; and (3)
the dynamic of the markets and commercial fl ows,
central to the structuring of Haitian sociality in
general and, specifi cally in the case of garbage, es-
1 La consommation d’eau à Bel-Air; Recensement Démographique,”
Rubem César Fernandes and Marcelo de
Sousa Nascimento – Bel Air, 2007, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
2 The main objectives of the project “Currency, Market
and Nations. An ethnography of/in Haiti in a comparative
perspective,” which receives fi nancial support
from CNPq and FAPERJ and is coordinated by Federico
Neiburg, are: (1) to observe spatial organization, the
circulation of people and objects, the social meanings
of money, the different monetary systems used, and the
different units of measure and forms of exchange; (2)
to examine how markets are inserted in larger temporal
and spatial processes at national and international
level, encompassing a wide variety of agents (buyers
and sellers, political and military actors, development
experts, state institutions, international agencies, etc.);
sential to any understanding of the survival mechanisms,
social interconnections and forms of monetary
circulation found among the poorest sectors
of the population (see map).
The text presents the perceptions of the area’s
residents concerning garbage (what is ‘garbage’?
to whom?), 3 the uses and circuits of the different
types of garbage (ranging from simply ‘throwing
stuff away’ to forms of recycling and commercialization).
It also looks to contrast the viewpoints of
the intervention agencies (governmental and nongovernmental)
concerning garbage with those of
the local population, mapping the agents and institutions
that form part of this social universe, including
the different professionals (the people who
“make a living from garbage”) such as the pickers,
street and latrine cleaners, intermediaries, cleaning,
collection and recycling companies, state institutions
and employees responsible for managing
waste, and international cooperation agencies
(multilateral like the UNDP and IADB, and governmental
like the AFD) and NGOs who implement
policies founded on a variety of principles. This,
in turn, allows us to situate the initiatives developed
in this area by VR.
Anyone walking in the streets of Port-au-Prince
will immediately notice the omnipresence of
garbage, piled up in the streets, in the improvised
dumps on the street corners, on embankments and
in canals. Large semi-abandoned dumpsters overfl
ow with garbage on the public roads, hindering
the circulation of pedestrians and cars and impeding
the drainage of rainwater and sewage. Especially
in the historic centre where the city’s mar-
and (3) to contribute, through the ethnography of Haiti’s
markets and currencies, towards the comprehension
of the (inter)national dimension of Haitian social
life, the interactions between people and social collectives
in a comparative perspective. The world of garbage,
in terms of the infrastructure and sanitary conditions
of the markets themselves and in terms of the
intense recycling and commercialization of discarded
objects, is undoubtedly an important line of analysis
for this project.
3 In general terms we can adopt a working defi nition
of garbage as material discarded by someone for whom
it has become useless. The category is thus situational,
dependent on perspectives and uses, following the
ideas of Mikael Drackner (2005), himself inspired by
Mary Douglas (1973).
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