Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeNuméros11.1Picturing Sensitive Matters

Picturing Sensitive Matters

How to Make Waste and Plastics Visible in Viêt Nam and Beyond
Mikaëla Le Meur

Abstracts

Within the framework of an anthropology of techniques and material culture focused on the relationship between humans and non-humans in a context of ecological crisis, the objective of this article is to contribute to a discussion on the function of images – animated or static, realistic or imaginary – both as ethnographic tools and as modes of scientific writing and knowledge sharing. This article draws on ethnographic data from the multi-sited PhD research I conducted in Viêt Nam between 2011 and 2018 which focused on urban waste politics, social and environmental lives of plastic waste, and supply chains of globalised plastic recycling. In this authoritarian context, I argue that waste and plastics are sensitive matters that engage politics of representation: between the official ‘good image’ of Viêt Nam and the ethnographic pictures that make these waste matters visible, the researcher has to contend with an ‘elephant in the room’. Through a reflective analysis of different experiences and practices of photography, filmmaking, and drawing illustration, this paper will thus address political, ethical, and aesthetic issues related to the circulation and publishing of research images inside and outside of academia.

Top of page

Full text

Introduction1

  • 1 The author would like to thank the editors of the volume and the anonymous reviewers for their enga (...)

‘Men rarely see living elephants.
As they come by the skeleton of a dead elephant,
they imagine its living form according to its features.
Therefore it comes to pass that whatever people use
for imagining the real is called elephant 象.’
Han Feizi - 221 BCE.

  • 2 It is hard to find an English equivalent to the term ‘sensible’ in French. In this article, I mostl (...)

1This sentence of the Chinese philosopher Han Feizi gives an interpretation of why, in the context of the disappearance of elephants from ancient China, the translingual character 象 means both ‘elephant’ (the glyph origin is a pictographic representation of an elephant) and ‘to depict’, ‘to represent’, ‘to resemble’ or ‘image’ and ‘picture’. The story that accompanies this ideograph illustrates the process of representing the world and shows both the connection and the distinction between reality and images (Rancière 2003) as well as the risk that images betray (cf. René Magritte’s painting La trahison des images, 1928-1929) or even ‘consume’ reality (Sontag 1977). If I link this ancient Chinese reference to a contemporary English idiomatic expression in order to qualify the multi-sited ethnographic research I conducted in Viêt Nam during my PhD in anthropology on waste issues and plastic matter, totalising 18 months between 2011 and 2018, I would say that, in this authoritarian socialist republic, waste and plastics are the elephant in the room. By this assertion, I mean that waste and plastics are both a tangible matter anchored in the reality of my fieldwork and a political problem that I tried to document, understand, and analyse visually, by picturing it and making it visible, even if the Vietnamese context often prevented from watching it. In other words, I argue that waste and plastics can be considered as sensitive matters – i.e. both sensory matter and ‘political matter’ (Bennett 2010; Braun and Whatemore 2010) in that materiality is the basis for subjectification and shapes political relations through forms of governmentality (Bayart and Warnier 2004) – and these sensitive matters engage politics of representation. In this article, I want to address these politics of representation, and to a broader extent, the political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of the ‘distribution of the sensible’2 (Rancière 2000) related to anthropological knowledge production and sharing. To do so, I will present the methodological, epistemological, and ethical issues that arose during different visual writing experiences of my doctoral research on urban waste politics, social and environmental lives of plastic waste, and supply chains of globalised plastic recycling. The text will follow my research experience chronologically, with an attempt to draw reflections on how images can contribute to transforming fieldwork into academic knowledge but also to engaging with public anthropology, by ‘using anthropological approaches to [address] pressing questions of public concern’ (Callejas et al. 2023) in Viêt Nam and beyond.

  • 3 North Korea and China are the first and the second of this index.

2As I will further develop in this article, the political context of Viêt Nam makes researchers work under pressure, although it is much riskier to be a Vietnamese journalist or blogger than a foreign researcher in this one-party socialist republic. Regarding freedom of the press, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Viêt Nam 178th out of 180 countries in 2023, considering the country ‘the third prison in the world for journalists.3’ In the first part of this article, I will therefore discuss the role of collecting photographs as evidence when speech faces political constraints or censorship and when the ethnographer cannot lead semi-directed interviews as freely as she would like to. The ‘good image’ of the country that Vietnamese people, especially interpreters, are asked to show to a foreign researcher will then contrast with the haunting ghosts of waste-image accumulations, thereby opening a debate on the definition of a ‘good’ photograph in social anthropology, between evidence, significance, aesthetics, and affect (Collier 1967; Becker 1981; Conord 2002; Edwards 2015). In a second part, I will focus on animated images and the way video became a ‘notebook’ to study movement, gestures, and technological processes (Leroi-Gourhan 1948) during the ethnography that I developed within a village specialised in plastic waste recycling in Hanoi’s residential and industrial suburbs. At that time in 2014 and later during my research, my smartphone camera helped me quickly picture the material transformations that were happening in the recycling workshops and video progressively became a narrative medium to share my broader understanding of recycling and plasticity. In the third part of the article, I will discuss the boundaries between showing and representing through a reflexive analysis of two writing experiences that made use of drawings. I will demonstrate how drawings can evoke what cannot easily be shown with photographs or videos, by illustrating empirical research and its concepts but also protecting the people encountered during fieldwork from objectification (Sontag 1977). This final argument will thus emphasise the need to continuously define certain ethics of the sensible when images are involved in anthropological knowledge production and sharing, so as to both take care of the interlocutors and still deal with sensitive matters related to their working and living conditions.

Waste-image Accumulations: Evidence Against the ‘Good Image’ and Ghosts of the Damage

The good image

The good image

This photograph shows an employee of the urban waste collection service in the coastal city of Quy Nhơn pushing a rubbish cart next to the typical propaganda posters of the regime. It was taken on January 30th 2014 during Tết holiday (Vietnamese Lunar New Year), a time when a particular effort is made by local authorities to clean the streets and by households to clean their homes

Photo by Mikaëla Le Meur 2014

3During the five fieldwork stints I conducted in Viêt Nam for my doctoral research from 2011 to 2018, I accumulated a lot of images of waste. This was the result of a photo-ethnographic approach I started to develop in 2011 while exploring two towns in the centre of the country on foot, successively accompanied by two female interpreters, somewhat younger than me. I mention them to highlight the importance of their active participation in the production of my research and because the role of interpreters must be visible through scientific reflexivity (Temple and Edwards 2002). I met them in the capital of the region where they had recently graduated in English at the local university and I organised several stays with them in the two towns, where we were mostly hosted by Vietnamese families. In the first town, my first interpreter and I developed a strong emotional bond with some women – my ‘aunts’ – who regularly hosted me throughout my doctoral research and with whom I continue to stay in contact. In the second town, our host families changed several times until some police officers working with the People’s Committee forced us to leave the town. One of our hosts told us that two policemen came to her house when we were out and after that visit, she did not want to welcome us anymore because she thought we had dangerous plans threatening the security of the nation. This happened even though I had the necessary research permits from the provincial and district administration showing the proper documents with the right signatures and ‘red stamps’ which are similarly required in many Asian socialist republics (Turner 2013). In comparison with the first town, waste management issues were highly sensitive in this second locality where corruption quickly appeared to be a problem during our interviews and where relations between city dwellers and their administration seemed to be tense. Among other things, the unequal access to public services and facilities aroused a feeling of injustice and the problems that town-dwellers were facing with their garbage gave me a good insight into everyday urban governance (Bouju 2009), power relations (Guitard 2012) and the production of citizenship (Anand 2017). Moreover, many of my interlocutors seemed to feel pressured as to what they could or could not say. Even if we did enjoy some serene and fruitful encounters, I was also often criticised for asking too many questions and my interpreter was sometimes reprimanded: she had to show a ‘good image’ of Viêt Nam and she was not supposed to help me visit the garbage dumps which could be considered a hidden side of the ‘public iconography’ of street propaganda posters (Bayly 2019). Thus, we became persona non grata after a few weeks of fieldwork and authorities refused to let us stay in the town. After being summoned to the police station, we were asked to leave the town the next morning. This tricky phase of the research almost discouraged us, and we were about to leave town when we got help from a woman not much older than me whom we met during a last interview. She was a local government officer at the department of agriculture of the town’s People’s Committee and was intrigued by my research, so she decided to host us for a few days in her house where we met her husband and children. She considered that our presence was not a problem and, because of her position, could deal with the authorities. This turbulent fieldwork experience is only one example of the many constraints that put pressure on researchers in an authoritarian context, where the ethnographer is dependent on the capacity of some ‘gatekeepers’ to facilitate research and cross the ‘official lines’, and on their own ability to befriend these strategic actors (Bonnin 2010).

  • 4 Vietnamese Decree on the grading of urban centers No. 42/2009/ND-CP

4In this pressured context, the aim of the photo-ethnographic walking explorations I developed with my interpreters was triple. Firstly, this method was a way of emancipating myself from the official top-down approach that forces Vietnamese or foreign researchers to start with a visit to different administration officers who then introduce her to subordinates, intermediaries and local people selected for interviews according to their morality and their obedience to authorities. During our pedestrian explorations, the majority of the interviews were improvised with the people we had the opportunity to meet in the street, in front of houses, in cafes, etc. These discussions on the spot have sometimes freed people’s voices, whether in the calmness of a remote living room at the edge of town or in the collective excitement of a lunch party – washed down with lots of beers – to which we were invited in passing. Secondly, my purpose was spatial. As an anthropologist specialised in urban environmental issues, I wanted to grasp the whole territory of these towns ranked in the ‘first grade’ of urbanisation according to Vietnamese law4, where an average of 15,000 to 20,000 city-dwellers lived. I was hoping I could build a spatial representativeness in my survey. With this territorialized methodology, following the ‘flow of experience’ and exploring each place on foot (Edensor 2010), I was also drawing lines of perception that helped me to understand the inhabited ‘meshwork’ of towns and the experiences of their inhabitants (Ingold 2007). In practice, I found it fundamental to relate the content of interviews to the local specificities of each landscape, residential configuration and environmental issue that I had witnessed. Thirdly – and this is one of the major ideas I want to stress in the first part of this article – this methodology provided a significant place of observation to counterbalance the limits of the discourses in an authoritarian context when the ethnographer has to deal with an ‘agentive silence’ (Bayly 2019).

5From the beginning of my research and because I formerly used a digital single-lens reflex camera as an amateur, I used photography as an investigative technique in the same way as I would collect words, observations, and stories, whether recorded or written: like many other anthropologists, I was using ‘the camera as a research tool’ (Collier 1967). In a context where the organisation of interviews only partially satisfied my research objectives, this initially naïve practice turned out to be scientifically and politically crucial. Not fluent enough in the Vietnamese language (even if I learned it and practised it for the daily conversations with my hosts and friends), I was frustrated by the interviews conducted with my interpreters and sometimes doubted the fidelity of their translations. Besides, it also appeared that they occasionally refused to tell me what my interlocutors had said, arguing that ‘it was off-topic’ or because the criticisms of the local government were too harsh. One day, after an interview where my interpreter stopped translating a man visibly angry with the authorities, we had an argument on the ethics of translation that ended up strengthening our professional relationship and friendship. During this discussion, she acknowledged that she used to change people’s words, sometimes to either clarify or expand their ‘poor answers’ or to understate their criticism, thus illustrating ‘the tensions in asking anyone to represent other people’s views’ (Temple and Edwards 2002: 9). While we could sometimes hear virulent denunciations of the corrupted institutions, most of the time the inhabitants used to answer the question ‘how would you judge waste management in the town’ by an idiomatic expression ‘cùng được’ that one of my interpreters used to translate by ‘normal’ or ‘nothing to report’. However, we noticed many dysfunctions: systematic garbage truck breakdowns, erratic waste collection, illegal waste dumping, neighbourhood conflicts regarding litter, etc. Faced with this often neutralised or sometimes idealised picture with a ‘portrayal of situations as how things ought to be rather than how they actually were’ (Scott et al. 2006), the photographs allowed me to produce another discourse.

Waste-images accumulations

Waste-images accumulations

From houses to dumpsites: accumulations of household waste in the streets and the environment of two Vietnamese towns in Central Viêt Nam between 2011 and 2014.

Photo by Mikaëla Le Meur

  • 5 ‘the realist illusion which believes in a direct and objective access to reality and forgets that r (...)

6These images and my observations helped to triangulate sources of information, and I gradually accumulated material evidence of waste and pollution, while the discourses tended to make them disappear. From house doorsteps to municipal dumpsites, passing through alleys, gutters, vacant lots, canals, and rivers, I sought to make visible the sensitive matter that was hidden behind the ‘good image’ that the majority of my interlocutors were continuously reinforcing. From a positivist perspective, anchored in the history of a ‘metric rationality’ which aims at ‘measuring danger’ (Houdart, Manceron and Revet 2015), I think my photo accumulation was also an attempt to objectify the pollution by quantifying a material disorder, as an environmental scientist would do with his/her own measuring instruments. Being unable to quantify pollution with the tools of social sciences was often at stake during my interdisciplinary collaborations and I remember that a Vietnamese physical geographer once asked me to bring with me to the field a Biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) measuring pack, so as to evaluate the water quality of a polluted river. I was unable to satisfy his request, but I used my photographs in a seminar presentation led in his academic department as a way of showing the ‘facts’. Nevertheless, retrospectively, I would put into question the epistemological perspective on which this use of photography is based, that is to say ‘l’illusion réaliste, qui croit en un accès direct et objectif [au] réel de référence, et oublie que ce dernier est une construction sociale’ (Olivier de Sardan 2008: 9)5 and the idea that the camera would be a ‘transparent recording medium’ (Edward 2015: 237). Even garbage accumulations, that would easily be considered ‘matters of fact’, are socially constructed as ‘matters of concern’ (Latour 1999), whether they be matter put out of sight of the official Vietnamese ‘good image’, or continuously invading the field of vision of the ethnographer. If there was an official truth in the ‘good image’, my photographic accumulations were an attempt to catch the reality of an underlying ‘drama’ that I took time to identify and that ‘was worth photographing’ (Becker 1981: 11).

  • 6 ‘one only sees what one looks at’ (My translation)

7To conclude this first part, I would like to insist on the ethnographic point of view that presides over the production of images of waste. If I push this reflexivity further, my photographic accumulations are ambivalent and this abundance of images cannot remain as ‘unproblematized evidence’ (Edwards 2015). Just as ‘[t]he relationship between photography and anthropology can be characterised as one that, almost from the start, has been tensioned between evidence and affect in the production of knowledge’ (Edwards 2015: 236), my photographs are both a sign of certain objectified waste issues in the Vietnamese towns where I conducted fieldwork and a sign of a personal anthropological obsession for garbage. In other words, if ‘on ne voit que ce qu’on regarde’6 (Lenclud 2013: 73), I must add that the more often one looks, the faster one sees what one is already used to seeing. A person whose attention is constantly drawn to a singular thing or matter is, therefore, likely to focus on it, while other people who do not share this attention may not even see it. This can lead to a discrepancy between the researcher and their interlocutors, or between the researcher and the public, and it is the aim of an ‘education to attention’ to reduce this gap (Ingold 2001). Be that as it may, it is important to put things into perspective and consider that we are not equally haunted by the ‘ghosts’ of environmental damage. If it is necessary to distinguish between those we can or ‘we cannot see and those we choose to forget’ (Tsing et al. 2017: 8), it is also necessary to consider different ‘we’s who picture the cohabitation between humans and things in different ways. In the end, analysing this photo-ethnographic practice that photographed waste accumulations in Vietnamese towns can help to reframe the discussion of the objectivity-relativism binary through the idea of situated knowledge production (Haraway 1988) inside the eye of the ethnographer and the lens of her camera. I will now continue this discussion by showing how videos helped me understand plasticity and share my research to a broader public.

Filming Under Pressure to Catch Gestures, Matter Transformations, and Flows

8In 2014, helped by my thesis director, I found some scientific and administrative support in the Vietnamese National University of Agriculture (former Hanoi University of Agriculture) to obtain research authorisations that relocated my fieldwork to the North of the country. At the end of a seminar in the Department of Sociology, where I presented my study on waste issues in central towns of Viêt Nam, a Vietnamese colleague recommended that I go to a neighbouring town where there were significant waste accumulations. She added: ‘The people living there are said to make a lot of money out of it’. Following her advice, I started to develop research in the town of Như Quỳnh, where a village called Minh Khai has specialised in waste plastic recycling for about three decades now, importing tons of this ‘secondary raw material’ from all over the world in containers crossing oceans on long journeys after being exported by the ‘Global North’. After some explorations alone in the area, where I met some residents who invited me to their home, I had to find an interpreter to accompany me to the heart of Minh Khai village where I wanted to conduct interviews with local entrepreneurs and workers in the recycling sector. On the university campus, I met a woman a few years younger than me who was looking for professional experience with foreigners after graduating in economics. She agreed to go with me to the area of Minh Khai for several weeks. Together, we used the same methodology that I had tested in the central region of the country: a walking photo-ethnography throughout the commune and in the village so has to provoke spontaneous discussions with the inhabitants and local workers, hoping that these improvised encounters would lead to longer interviews in homes and factories. The only difference with my former field research was that we were not staying in the neighbourhood overnight because we both had a room on the university campus, about thirty minutes by bus from the commune. Another reason is that this place was not overtly welcoming. The surroundings of Minh Khai were swamped by mountains of trash, and any stranger coming with the intention to ask questions aroused suspicions. Taking pictures in the street was also troubling the industrious atmosphere of the place, and even if the materiality of garbage piles was obvious to every passer-by, the fact that two young ladies (one being foreign) were looking at them, particularly through the lens of a camera, seemed to make it even more visible and therefore problematic. Although all my research authorisations were in order, we faced many police controls, in the street or at the station, and a kind of harassment by unidentified men who used to hurl at us from their motorbikes, ‘You are not welcome here!’ or ‘Get out of town!’ Nevertheless, many residents kindly accepted to talk with us about the history of the town, the changes of the landscape and their perception of the recycling economy. Some employees or entrepreneurs also welcomed us into their factories so as to show the process of plastic scrap transformation and talk about their work.

The myth of recycling

The myth of recycling

This photograph taken near Minh Khai village represents what I call the myth of recycling insofar as these bourgeois houses growing on mountains of trash symbolise a ‘waste to gold’ alchemy (Le Meur 2016). However, my research tackled this theoretical matter transformation by showing that this plasticity requires significant manual work, energy, and water; that this globalised recycling economy relies on highly stratified and flexible labour, unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, unequal economic benefits, and local corruption. It produces also heavy environmental damage.

Photo by Mikaëla Le Meur 2014

9Inside the warehouses and the workshops, I continued to take pictures with my digital single-lens reflex camera, but I also started to use another tool that I had recently purchased: a smartphone. It was particularly useful when some workers invited us to the factories while their bosses were absent. Some kindly gave us a few minutes of their time to show their work and their working conditions, but they could not talk to us much because it was impossible to stop the production line. These subversive factory visits were pretty unsettling because the employees took the risk of being interrupted by their boss while we were there. On an ethical level, the ethnographer must make a choice between loyalty to the factory owner – as a legal representative of the workshops who could deny us entry – and loyalty to her informants who in a way express a desire to open the doors and the ‘black box’ of plastic recycling. In these cases, and because we never forced anyone to open any door, we have chosen to be loyal to the workers who had good reasons to let us in. On other occasions, we managed to negotiate appointments with some entrepreneurs who agreed to show us their factories and to give us an interview. These exchanges were longer and more akin to the factories and workshop tours that were set up to improve commercial public relations. The result is that we could see a variety of plastic factories, from the small, dirty, and dangerous ones, to the big, secured, and tidy ones where the raw material was not untidy plastic scrap, but ‘pure’ plastic pellets imported from petrochemical production centres such as Saudi Arabia.

10Inside the dirtiest factories, where the workers recycled plastic scrap in adverse working conditions, we worked under short time pressure and tried to optimise it to get a lot of information quickly. So, after getting oral permission, I would make videos of the entire recycling chain with my smartphone. Before, after, and sometimes during filming, I also asked a few questions to my interpreter who was trying to chat with the workers without disturbing their work. Our duo improvised a division of labour to fulfil the research objectives: I focused on the images while she focused on the words, and we brought everything together in our conversations walking down the street. In some other factories, we were less under pressure because, fortunately, the boss had accepted our visit. However, our presence was still disturbing. It was difficult to find a good observation point, close enough to film the gestures of the workers and the plastic matter getting in and out of the machines, and distant enough not to bump into other bodies or devices, not to hinder the production processes. The only moment when time would slow down was during the interviews with the entrepreneurs, who often suggested discussing anywhere other than the workshop, whether in the living room of their adjoining house, in the courtyard, or in the factory lobby. These places were quiet enough to have a conversation and we could hear everyone’s voices better. However, one voice was missing in these situations: the voice of the employees. On a few occasions, we had the good fortune to talk a little longer with these workers, especially during a power cut in a factory: the production process had been stopped, so there was free time to chat.

11In addition to my notebook, my recorded interviews, and my memories of the conversations we had with my interpreter while walking from one place to another or during our breaks in cafés or workers’ canteens, I accumulated a number of video rushes. When I was alone on the university campus, I watched them over and over again, to catch the details I could not see during filming. Reading John Collier's classic book Visual Anthropology, I identify with the ‘unexperienced fieldworker’ who ‘can record with accuracy the operations of a sawmill, even if he has a shallow grasp of what is going on’ and who makes ‘technological record’ with ‘alertness and patience’ so as ‘they can be re-studied later’ especially ‘if a technology repeats’ (Collier 1967: 27-28). The thing that interested me the most was understanding all the steps of the recycling chain and the technical details that were necessary to change plastic waste into a marketable object. Once again, Collier gives very interesting insights on the relations between technology and images: ‘The larger relationships of a technology require us to photograph not only the process but also the source of raw materials and later the cultural end of the created product’ (Collier 1967: 29). Therefore, I started to use my video rushes to recompose the whole process of plastic transformation. Editing the videos helped me to understand the ‘operational sequence’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1965) of plastic recycling in the village of Minh Khai, from the moment the plastic waste from the containers arrives at the factories, is crushed and washed, then melted by an extruder and finally turned into pellets. In addition to showing the very plasticity of the polyethylene films that are recycled in this area, I also tried to show in these videos the gestures of the workers, the atmosphere of the workshops, and the working conditions. The two following videos are the result of this editing work. The first one focuses on the factories that turn dirty plastic films into recycled plastic pellets, which are a kind of ore to Minh Khai’s recycling entrepreneurs. The second shows the production lines in the locality mixing different qualities of this local ore with tinted pellets (which are not made from recycled plastic but are ‘pure’ raw material) in order to manufacture basic plastic objects that will be marketed mainly in Viêt Nam: plastic bags.

12

Recomposition

Mikaëla Le Meur 2015

About the author(s) : Mikaëla Le Meur

Video-Link: https://vimeo.com/​1023500218

13

Shaping

Mikaëla Le Meur 2015

About the author(s) : Mikaëla Le Meur

Video-Link: https://vimeo.com/​1023503196

14Because the recycling plants use a lot of water to wash dirty plastic scrap before melting it, I also tried to film the sewage streams from the factories of Minh Khai village throughout the locality. When I conducted my fieldwork, there was no sewage treatment plant but only a canal leading the dark waters full of plastic fragments to a small river connected to the Red River delta. I also edited a video of these flows and these animated images helped me deepen my understanding and representation of plasticity and plastic pollution, the latter which are linked to the macro and the visible, but also to the micro and the invisible. The multiple forms of plastic matters in the environment and their toxic aggregates produce a sort of ‘miasma’ (Liboiron 2013) that I hope this third video can illustrate.

15

Video-Link: https://vimeo.com/​1023506844

16As I explained earlier, before my fieldwork in Minh Khai village, I used to illustrate my seminar talks with a number of photographs of waste accumulations as evidence of my observations and also ‘as a sensitive resource in empirical research’ (Perrin-Joly and Josse-Durand 2023). But the plastic turn of my ethnography brought me to consider things and matter in a more dynamic way: plastics helped me truly consider waste with its ‘thing-power materiality’ (Hawkins 2010: 131) as a changing and ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett 2010). Therefore, video became an important medium for me to share my results in a vivid way.

17Because some of my colleagues encouraged me to develop this sensitive way of presenting my research and also because I enjoyed this video editing experience, the ethnographic film opened up new perspectives onto the possibilities of creating scientifically based narratives. This is why, in 2018, I also worked on a short movie that I integrated into my doctoral dissertation: À nos ancêtres.

18

To our ancestors

Mikaëla Le Meur 2018

About the author(s) : Mikaëla Le Meur

Video-Link: https://vimeo.com/​1023493302

19I wanted to use a more personal lens to share anthropological questions related to ecological issues in Viêt Nam and beyond, in an attempt to put into practice the idea of Donna Haraway of ‘making kin in the Chthulucene’ (Haraway 2016). In this short movie in French, English, and Vietnamese, images of the social lives of waste and plastics are combined with recordings from interviews in a manner that reverses the balance between evidence and affect that I formerly built while using photographs in the field. With this project, I hope that ‘affects themselves become evidential’ (Edwards 2015: 240) so as to make the public understand the melancholic discourse of my Vietnamese interlocutors who are afraid of the rapid environmental transformations occurring in their city, Quy Nhơn. After sharing the movie with my own family, it circulated both in and out of academia. The interesting thing is that this short film has been scheduled not only in a few seminars but also in two bars in Marseille (France) and Liège (Belgium) and it generated discussions with different kinds of audiences. In the last part of this article, I would like to discuss further what is at stake when we extend the audience of our academic productions, especially through the use of images.

Picturing: Showing, Illustrating, Representing, Sharing, Protecting

20As the previous analyses of my fieldwork experiences in Viêt Nam show, pictures have always been central to my ethnographic approach, but they also gradually became central to my way of writing and sharing anthropology. In the last part of this article, I want to develop a reflexive analysis of two works with which I can illustrate a dialogue between words and pictures in anthropological knowledge production and sharing: an exhibition and a book.

21Plastic Matter: Wild Lives7 is an interdisciplinary traveling exhibition written in French and English and translated into Vietnamese, which I created with two colleagues from environmental sciences – Émilie Strady, a French biogeochemist, and Kiêu Lê Thuy Chung, a Vietnamese geologist – and a French artist and graphic designer, Elza Montlahuc, with the support of IRD, the French Research Institute for Development. I met Émilie Strady during a fieldwork trip in Viêt Nam in 2016. In the past, she had studied metal pollution in rivers and the amount of plastic waste she could see in the Saigon River in Ho-Chi-Minh City led her to work on a new research project focusing on qualifying and quantifying plastic debris in water streams. After realising how much of our research was complementary, we decided to work on an exhibition that could paint a general picture of the social and environmental lives of plastics in Viêt Nam (Le Meur and Strady 2020). Mainly based on my doctoral research, this exhibition mixes photographs, small texts and captions, figures, and graphic objects created by Elza Montlahuc.

The first of the 22 boards of the exhibition launched at the International Centre for Interdisciplinary Science and Education in Quy Nhơn, on the central coast of Viêt Nam in 2018.

22In order to make the exhibition attractive to a wide audience, and because she found its content a little gloomy, Elza Montlahuc proposed using acid colours of drinking straws and graphic textures resembling the candy wrappers. She gave an aesthetic unity to the exhibition and helped us draw and guide attention to the plastic matter in its various forms of social and environmental life.

Highlighting plastics: a detail of the exhibition

Highlighting plastics: a detail of the exhibition

Photo by Mikaëla Le Meur, editing Elza Montlahuc 2018

23As we were both based in Marseille, Elza Montlahuc and I worked closely on the visual identity of the exhibition. One board happened to require more time than the others. It was the central one which aimed at summarising the general theme in a single image through a kind of subjective mapping. I even consider this ‘plastic world’ as a representation of my PhD research insofar as all my fieldwork sites are visible in it, and many of the people I met are also featured.

A plastic world: the 10th plate of the exhibition

A plastic world: the 10th plate of the exhibition

Exhibition ‘Plastic Matter: Wild Lives’ IRD 2018

24Unfortunately, this plate was removed from the exhibition during its last presentation in Hanoi in January 2022. After it had been scheduled several times in Viêt Nam with the support of IRD, on university campuses, in French institutions, and even in supermarkets, Vietnamese censorship threatened French partners to forbid it. The problem was not related to the ‘bad image’ of Viêt Nam the exhibition showed, as a colleague from a provincial university once told me after seeing it, but the fact that the two ‘maps’ of Viêt Nam were ‘wrong’. According to the censors, we had not correctly represented the Spratly and Paracel archipelagos which the government of Viêt Nam claims in the Eastern Sea, as many other Asian nations do. As we knew this risk, I had actually asked Elza to represent these islands in the ‘plastic world’ image, but it seems it was not rendered well enough. In 2022, three years after the exhibition was published, a revised version was made: the central image was removed, and the small map of Viêt Nam on the credit page was quickly modified to add the archipelagos. The exhibition received the authorisation to be scheduled at the French Institute in Hanoi. The sensitive matter was no longer waste accumulation or plastic pollution, but a maritime land promising oil extraction and other strategic resources. This experience shows how pictures can cross political lines, even if they are figurative (which does not mean unrealistic), colourful, and seem inoffensive at first sight.

The censorship authorization

The censorship authorization

This document shows that each board of the exhibition had been examined to fulfil the requirements of the censorship department and that the authorisation only covers the event scheduled at the French Institute in Hanoi for two weeks in 2022.

Vietnamese government 2022

A revised version of the exhibition

A revised version of the exhibition

Event ‘Plastiques : pollutions & solutions’ at L’Espace, French Institute, Hanoi, January 2022.

Photo by Phuong Anh Nguyen, IRD 2022

25In 2021, I had another opportunity to use drawings in my anthropological writings but this time, it was with the intention to stop using photographs of waste accumulations and waste workers. I wrote a book on plastic recycling based on the field research I conducted in the village of Minh Khai (which I described earlier), with a French publishing company that reaches a broad audience. Since my editor had access to my doctoral dissertation, she asked me to use photographs from the field to illustrate the book and she selected a few pictures she found particularly interesting. Most of these pictures showed Vietnamese women I had met while they were collecting waste door-to-door to later resell, or while they were sorting dirty waste plastic films on trash piles. When I met them in 2011, 2014, 2016, and 2017, I obviously asked these women if they agreed to be photographed for research purposes. However, I did not know what the future life of these images would be. During my PhD, I used these photographs to illustrate seminar presentations, academic articles, and even exhibitions, but when the opportunity arose to use them to illustrate a book, I considered that it was going too far. Ethically, something was wrong, and I had to stop acting as if an ad hoc oral agreement was usable forever. I probably should have stopped earlier, but the idea that the book would be commercialised on a larger scale compared to circulating solely within scientific circles was more problematic for me because the science and the greater good that I thought I was serving until then were vanishing. I was afraid of the multiplication of images of Vietnamese female waste collectors in French bookstores and of a ‘voyeuristic relation’ to their reality (Sontag 1977). Even if Susan Sontag developed her argument on and ‘against photography’ in the context of the American war in Viêt Nam (Nudelman 2014), the objectification of the Other through photography and what she denounces by saying ‘to collect photographs is to collect the world’ (Sontag 1977: 3) directly echoes the still contemporary debate on imperialist research practices and scientific extractivism. In this publication process of my research, I felt the “ethical urgency” of dealing with photographs as ‘affective objects’ (Edwards 2015: 247) and wanted to protect the faces of these ladies living and working in precarious and hard conditions, out of whom I was already talking a lot in the book through a combination of their words and mine. So, I decided to illustrate the text in another way. Perhaps spurred by the current ‘graphic boom’ in anthropology (Tondeur 2018) and a strong and collective interest in practices of hybridisation (Le Meur et al. 2019), I started to draw lines in black and white to represent the entire chain of plastic recycling from the containers arriving in Minh Khai village to the recycled pellets that were reserved for melting and manufacturing plastic bags. This range of entangled and knotted lines was strongly inspired by Tim Ingold’s Lines: A Brief History (2007) which I enjoyed reading at the beginning of my doctoral research. The images and the text of my book aimed at unfolding the myth of absolute plasticity and recycling as a perpetual matter formation and reformation (Barthes 1957), by tackling its logo made of three arrows spinning around endlessly like the one-band Möbius loop. Therefore, my drawings were a way of protecting the images of my field interlocutors while showing and representing my ethnographic results and the concepts of my research in a book addressed to a wider audience.

Recycling symbols

Recycling symbols

Iconographic research from Google Images 2022

Drawings by Mikaëla Le Meur 2021


26The audience that I imagined when I wrote and drew was mainly French, but I hope that someday, the book could be translated into Vietnamese. This means getting through censorship, but also finding Vietnamese editors, and for now, and for many reasons, this project seems deadlocked. However, luckily, it was translated into Korean by a South Korean publisher: Pulbit. I have never been to South Korea and do not read Korean, but I can now imagine another audience for my research there, and in February 2023, a Korean reader sent me an amazing email. She said: ‘Dear author, I am a reader of your book from Korea and I live in Hanoi. Today I read your book in only 2.5 hours, which was awe-inspiring.’ As a business developer, she had already visited Minh Khai village and wanted to develop a sustainable project there. Our conversation has just begun, but I am already impressed by the life of my book travelling back to one of my field research sites without me. As my Korean reader mentioned in her mail: ‘But as you know, Viêt Nam is a tricky country to get books shipped from abroad. So, I decided to read your book by e-book.’ In view of these international circulations, I feel more serene that I refused to show any Vietnamese face in the book because even if anthropological research somehow reveals little-known places or lives, bringing sensitive matters to light and often disturbing our common ideas, it should do no harm.

Conclusion

27As a researcher who has specialised in ecological issues related to waste and plastic pollution in a global context of environmental awareness raising and sociotechnical controversies (for example, on recycling), I always considered that anthropology should not be limited to academia but should be open to the discussion with a wider audience. I believe that the possibility of this discussion with the non-academic public relies on our capacity to produce singular forms of knowledge that can circulate with or without us and be appropriated by others outside a small circle of specialists. In other words, if there are ‘different types of publics and multiple ways of accessing them’ (Burawoy 2005: 7), there should be as many scientific objects to create, (non)academic positions to adopt, and speaking configurations to engage with. Therefore, each type of research-based image can be a tool for crossing borders and reaching a new space for discussion or a new audience, whether established or in formation. This is why I multiplied the techniques that could help me picture sensitive matters such as waste and plastics in Vietnamese towns, houses, streets, rivers, recycling warehouses and workshops. To produce ethnographic material and anthropological narratives, I engaged my whole body in the fieldwork, walking in rhythms with my interpreters, encountering people, listening to their stories, desires, and complaints, photographing and smelling decomposing garbage piles, watching and filming human gestures, changing matters and damaged environments. This movement only slowed down at night when I wrote in my notebook and the drawings that I later published are meant to represent these dynamical processes I embraced, and then analysed. Thus, the different images which I present in this article do not only reflect what happens in the eye of the ethnographer but also in her feet, in her mind and, in a certain way, in her guts: when disgust develops into feeling of injustice. Thereby, writing with images was a way of both sharing knowledge and expressing concerns.

28However, I think it is important to acknowledge that these ‘embodied polygraphies’ of my research – as the editors of this volume called them – participate in ‘the distribution of the sensible’ (i.e. Le partage du sensible of Jacques Rancière 2000) which shares, connects, divides, and separates. That is the ambiguity of the French word ‘partage’ and the reality of ‘an aesthetics of politics [that] engage[s] the practices of disfiguration and reconfiguration of what is given to sense perception’ and what is not (Panagia 2010). In other words, if these anthropological narratives enable access to other publics, they perhaps simultaneously close the discussion with others. One example is the controversy that exists within academia about the legitimate ways of writing. Almost forty years after Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), some academic colleagues still refer to the term ‘postmodern’ as a way of discrediting certain ways of doing anthropology. This controversy about narratives shows how different publics are being formed and distinguished within the very academic community. Besides, the division is particularly true when different political practices meet and when the constraints of an authoritarian context strongly pressurise the production and sharing of research. As I have discussed in this article, in Viêt Nam there is a divide between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ images that engage politics of representation as well as aesthetics: the widespread practice of editing photographs and correcting faces, saturating colours, and turning landscapes into scenery would be another entry to discuss these issues with a more cultural approach. Considering the performative power of images, if expressing things makes them become ‘real’ (Bourdieu 1993), picturing and showing sensitive matters produce trouble as if everyone suddenly realised there is an elephant in the room. However, this is probably the basic nature of social sciences to disturb preconceived ideas and images – the clichés – and even in authoritarian regimes can knowledge be produced and shared. It is our duty to attempt to produce a shareable science without doing harm. What I tried to demonstrate in this paper is that picturing sensitive matters is clearly a way of stimulating knowledge production processes and discussions with other publics, whether established or still in formation. But it is also a way of revealing some political and ethical limits that the anthropologist has to consider very carefully, especially regarding pictures of people engaging in these matters. When and where to cross or not to cross any of these lines? When and where to make them thicker or thinner? That is the question.

Top of page

Bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHY=

_Anand, Nikhil. 2017. Hydraulic City, Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Durham: Duke University Press.

_Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris : Seuil.

_Bayart, Jean-François and Jean-Pierre Warnier, eds. 2004. Matières à politique. Le pouvoir, les corps et les choses. Paris : Karthala.

_Bayly, Susan. 2019. The Voice of Propaganda. Terrain [Online] 72. https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/18881 (accessed August 28, 2024).

_Becker, Howard. 1981. Exploring Society Photographically. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

_Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.

_Bonnin, Christine. 2010. Navigating Fieldwork Politics, Practicalities and Ethics in the Upland Borderlands of Northern Vietnam. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 51(2): 179-192.

_Bouju, Jacky, 2009. Urban Dwellers, Politicians and Dirt: An Anthropology of Everyday Governance in Bobo-Dioulasso (Burkina Faso). In The Governance of Daily Life in Africa, Ethnographic Explorations of Public and Collective Services. Giorgio Blundo and Pierre-Yves Le Meur, eds. Pp. 143-170. Leiden: Brill.

_Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

_Braun, Bruce and Sarah J. Whatemore, eds. 2010. Political Matter. Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

_Burawoy, Michael. 2005. For Public Sociology. American Sociological Review 70: 4-28.

_Callejas, Linda M., Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein, Aaron Su and Elena Peeples. 2023. Publics, Anthropologies, and Public Anthropologies. American Anthropologist 126(1): 149-152.

_Clifford, James and George E. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press

_Collier, John. 1967. Visual Anthropology. Photography as a Research Method. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

_Conord, Sylvaine. 2002. Le choix de l’image en anthropologie : qu’est-ce qu’une « bonne » photographie ? ethnographiques.org [online] 2. https://www.ethnographiques.org/2002/Conord (accessed August 28, 2024).

_Edensor, Tim. 2010. Walking in Rhythms: Place, Regulation, Style and the Flow of Experience. Visual Studies 25(1): 69-79.

_Edwards, Elizabeth. 2015. Anthropology and Photography: A Long History of Knowledge and Affect. Photographies 8(3): 235–252.

_Guitard, Émilie. 2012. Le chef et le tas d'ordures : la gestion des déchets comme arène politique et attribut du pouvoir au Cameroun. Politique africaine 127(3): 155-177

_Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575-599.

_Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

_Hawkins, Gay. 2010. Plastic Materialities. In Political Matter. Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life. Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatemore, eds. Pp. 119-138. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Houdart, Sophie, Vanessa Manceron et Sandrine Revet. 2015. Connaître et se prémunir. La logique métrique au défi des sciences sociales. Ethnologie française 1(45): 11-17.

_Ingold, Tim. 2001. From the Transmission of Representations to the Education of Attention. In The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography. Harvey Whitehouse, ed. Pp. 113-154. Oxford: Berg.

_Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A brief history. London: Routledge

_Latour, Bruno. 1999. Politiques de la nature. Comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie, Paris : La Découverte.

_Le Meur, Mikaëla. 2016. Sous la montagne de plastique, une mine d’or ? Le mythe du recyclage à l’épreuve d’une filière vietnamienne. Techniques & Culture 65-66 [Online]

_Le Meur, Mikaëla, Noémie Marcus, Maïté Maskens, Céline Quellet et Madeleine Sallustio. 2019. Pourquoi faut-il débrider et hybrider les sciences sociales ? The Conversation [Online]. https://theconversation.com/pourquoi-faut-il-debrider-et-hybrider-les-sciences-sociales-114163 (accessed August 28, 2024).

_Le Meur, Mikaëla and Émilie Strady. 2020. Regard sur les vies sociales et environnementales des matières plastiques au Vietnam. La francophonie en Asie-Pacifique 6: 5-15.

_Lenclud, Gérard. 2013. L’universalisme ou le pari de la raison. Paris : Gallimard/Seuil/

_Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1948. Cinéma et sciences humaines. Le film ethnologique existe-t-il ? Revue de géographie humaine et d’ethnologie 3: 42-50

Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1965. Le geste et la parole II. La mémoire et les rythmes. Paris : Albin Michel.

_Liboiron, Max. 2013. Plasticizers. A Twenty-first-century Miasma. In Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic. Gabrys Jennifer, Gay Hawkins and Mike Michael, eds. Pp. 134-149. London: Routledge.

_Nudelman, Franny. 2014. Against Photography: Susan Sontag's Vietnam. Photography and Culture 7(1): 7-20.

_Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre. 2008. La rigueur du qualitatif. Louvain-la-Neuve : Academia Bruylant.

_Panagia, Davide. 2010. « Partage du sensible » : the Distribution of the Sensible. In Jacques Rancière Key concepts. Jean-Philippe Deranty, ed. Pp. 95-103. Stocksfield: Acumen Publishing.

_Perrin-Joly, Constance et Chloé Josse-Durand. 2023. Photography, a Sensitive (Re)Source for Social Sciences: The Production and Circulation of Visual Representations in African Social Worlds. Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies 6: 21-35.

_Rancière, Jacques. 2000. Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique. Paris : La Fabrique éditions.

_Rancière, Jacques. 2003. Le destin des images. Paris : La Fabrique éditions.

_Scott, Stephanie, Fiona Miller and Kate Lloyd. 2006. Doing Fieldwork in Development Geography, Research Culture and Research Spaces in Vietnam. Geographical Research 44(1): 28-40.

_Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

_Temple, Bogusia and Rosalind Edwards. 2002. Interpreters/translators and Cross-language Research: Reflexivity and Border Crossings. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 1(2): 1-12.

_Tondeur, Kim. 2018. Le Boom Graphique en Anthropologie. Histoire, actualités et chantiers futurs du dessin dans la discipline anthropologique, Omertaa, Journal for Applied Anthropology 2018 : 703-718.

_Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, eds. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

_Turner, Sarah, ed. 2013. Red Stamps and Gold Stars. Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Website

Plastic Matters: Wild lives https://en.ird.fr/plastic-matters-wild-lives (accessed August 28, 2024).

Top of page

Notes

1 The author would like to thank the editors of the volume and the anonymous reviewers for their engaging, supportive comments and Morgan Jenatton for helping sharpen the text.

2 It is hard to find an English equivalent to the term ‘sensible’ in French. In this article, I mostly use ‘sensitive’ but I do not want to change the words of Rancière whose work on the ‘sensible’ is already discussed in English by other scholars (such as Panagia 2010).

3 North Korea and China are the first and the second of this index.

4 Vietnamese Decree on the grading of urban centers No. 42/2009/ND-CP

5 ‘the realist illusion which believes in a direct and objective access to reality and forgets that reality is a social construction’ (My translation)

6 ‘one only sees what one looks at’ (My translation)

7 https://en.ird.fr/plastic-matters-wild-lives

Top of page

List of illustrations

Title The good image
Caption This photograph shows an employee of the urban waste collection service in the coastal city of Quy Nhơn pushing a rubbish cart next to the typical propaganda posters of the regime. It was taken on January 30th 2014 during Tết holiday (Vietnamese Lunar New Year), a time when a particular effort is made by local authorities to clean the streets and by households to clean their homes
Credits Photo by Mikaëla Le Meur 2014
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-1.jpg
File image/jpeg, 358k
Title Waste-images accumulations
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-2.jpg
File image/jpeg, 75k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-3.jpg
File image/jpeg, 80k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-4.jpg
File image/jpeg, 66k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-5.jpg
File image/jpeg, 80k
Caption From houses to dumpsites: accumulations of household waste in the streets and the environment of two Vietnamese towns in Central Viêt Nam between 2011 and 2014.
Credits Photo by Mikaëla Le Meur
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-6.jpg
File image/jpeg, 87k
Title The myth of recycling
Caption This photograph taken near Minh Khai village represents what I call the myth of recycling insofar as these bourgeois houses growing on mountains of trash symbolise a ‘waste to gold’ alchemy (Le Meur 2016). However, my research tackled this theoretical matter transformation by showing that this plasticity requires significant manual work, energy, and water; that this globalised recycling economy relies on highly stratified and flexible labour, unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, unequal economic benefits, and local corruption. It produces also heavy environmental damage.
Credits Photo by Mikaëla Le Meur 2014
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-7.jpg
File image/jpeg, 511k
Title Plastic Matter: Wild Lives
Caption https://www.calameo.com/​read/​003319384ab8b390a8ac6?page=1
Credits IRD 2018
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-8.jpg
File image/jpeg, 842k
Title Highlighting plastics: a detail of the exhibition
Credits Photo by Mikaëla Le Meur, editing Elza Montlahuc 2018
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-9.png
File image/png, 1.2M
Title Picturing plastics: details of the exhibition
Caption These drawings made by Elza Montlahuc for the exhibition are intended to represent different states of plastic matter: ordinary objects like Vietnamese colanders; visible and less visible plastic pollution symbols (macro and micro debris floating in the water); and, at the molecular level, the synthetic polymers made by human hands from hydrocarbons.
Credits Drawing by Elza Montlahuc 2018
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-10.png
File image/png, 47k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-11.png
File image/png, 96k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-12.png
File image/png, 67k
Title A plastic world: the 10th plate of the exhibition
Credits Exhibition ‘Plastic Matter: Wild Lives’ IRD 2018
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-13.jpg
File image/jpeg, 61k
Title The censorship authorization
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-14.jpg
File image/jpeg, 559k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-15.jpg
File image/jpeg, 605k
Caption This document shows that each board of the exhibition had been examined to fulfil the requirements of the censorship department and that the authorisation only covers the event scheduled at the French Institute in Hanoi for two weeks in 2022.
Credits Vietnamese government 2022
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-16.jpg
File image/jpeg, 418k
Title A revised version of the exhibition
Caption Event ‘Plastiques : pollutions & solutions’ at L’Espace, French Institute, Hanoi, January 2022.
Credits Photo by Phuong Anh Nguyen, IRD 2022
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-17.jpg
File image/jpeg, 55k
Title Recycling symbols
Credits Iconographic research from Google Images 2022
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-18.png
File image/png, 203k
Credits Drawings by Mikaëla Le Meur 2021
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/docannexe/image/10605/img-19.png
File image/png, 482k
Top of page

References

Electronic reference

Mikaëla Le Meur, Picturing Sensitive MattersAnthrovision [Online], 11.1 | 2024, Online since 27 October 2024, connection on 15 November 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/10605; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12rwy

Top of page

About the author

Mikaëla Le Meur

SASHA Architecture et Sciences Humaines, LAMC Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, Université Libre de Bruxelles

mikaela.le.meur@ulb.be

Top of page

Copyright

The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search