International Center for Cultural Studies

【ACS Institute 2023 -Day 3- 8/12- Activity Report】Daren Shi-chi Leung-Rethink Hygiene and Environmental Problems

2023-11-14

Rethink Hygiene and Environmental Problems (Via Our Shit)

Speaker: Dr. Daren Shi-chi Leung (Research Assistant Professor at Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong.)

Date: August 12, 2023

Location: ACS Institute, International Center for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.

Notes taken by Qi Li (PhD student, Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)

Dr. Daren Shi-chi Leung

What does it mean to become a “dirty ethnographer”?

Dr. Leung, who has studied the environment, food, and waste for years, sees his ethnographic work on human waste management as a way to rethink the urban-rural connection, human-nature relations, and the socialist-capitalist transition in China.

In the seminar “Rethink hygiene and environmental problems (via our shit)”, Dr. Leung positioned his research as an interdisciplinary study of human excrement, combining the discard studies in STS, the agroecology/farming dimension in environmental history, and the critical study on modernity in Cultural Studies.

Dr. Leung first introduced a Netflix science documentary episode Poop, connected (2020), a visualized work on “odyssey of shit” which shares similar concerns with his own work of doing “dirty ethnography”, and guides people to the underground world of cities—the sewage system. “Poop connects us all,” the main topic of the episode, indicates that “the most disgusting part of ourselves might just be our most significant contribution to the universe” (Latif Nasser). Thus, instead of just “flushing it and forgetting it,” Dr. Leung takes the management of sewage as an important key to explore the history of managing human waste.

In his argument, Dr. Leung said:

We eat as much as we excrete. And the toilet is more than merely a device letting their tension be flushed and forgotten. My historicization of human shit in the Chinese context renders the visible history of the present, a conjunctural present that re-connects the ways we produce food and the ways we handle our dirty disposal. It sheds light on other possibilities for the metabolic relationship of society and nature, to remedy social and ecological crises like worldwide soil degradation, and to think about what environmental health means to a more-than-human world.

When Dr. Leung started his research about hygiene regulation and environmental problems in the Chinese socialist period, he did not expect that the most important reformat for his research would be his mom. His mother was born in the late 1950s, right after the painful and hard time of the Great Famine. Collecting all sorts of organic waste and composting were part of her jobs and that would be compensated with workpoints (工分) by her production team. During the Cultural Revolution, her team built a new public toilet to produce manure for fertilizer and farming uses.

The socialist toilet system in Mao’s era (1950s-70s), according to Dr. Leung, was a combination of the agricultural collectivization movement and the patriotic hygiene movement. Dr. Leung gave an analysis of the process in three dimensions: 1. The valuation of humanure, 2. The socio-technological practices of toilets, and 3. The political transformation of rural-urban exchange.

As Schneider and McMichael (2010) stated, socialist China developed its specific agroecological knowledge that constructed the value of humanure and governs relations associated with humans and ecology. In the communal economy, workpoint refers to a remuneration system/method in favor of local control over the annual organization of agricultural input and the distribution of its output. It reasonably maintained households’ food consumption, like rice, sweet potatoes, and vegetables grown in the collective and private farms. The more fertile the land, the more yield the year, and the more grain (or cash) distributed to its members. Thus, every rural brigade was encouraged to establish their own professional manure teams, which included cadres, peasants, barefoot doctors and medical experts, who were equipped not only with the technical skills of composting but also Maoist revolutionary thought. Also, toilet management concerning both fertilizer and hygiene. Related workers will be remunerated by distinguished humanure and other kinds of manure in terms of quality and quantity.

Dr. Leung then explained how the social-technological practices of toilets worked. He took the “scientific compost” as an example. “Scientific compost” was one of the key “red” technologies in Mao’s era. It emphasized the alliance between scientists, local cadres, peasants, and health experts, on-field experiments (like sealing fermentation), and concern for both human health and soil health.

After briefly introducing the socialist practice of the “scientific compost” and the environmental hygiene movement (of which the most important role was barefoot doctors, who had basic and comprehensive knowledge of medicine, medical care, and public hygiene management in rural China), Dr. Leung offered a detailed elaboration on the political transformation of rural-urban exchange towards the transformation of urban nightsoil market to collective economy. In this case, he observed that by adopting the language of the Cultural Revolution, the local cadres reframed the collective management of human waste as a class struggle “to annihilate traditional habits,” namely the “bad wind of old thoughts.” The termination of the nightsoil market means that rural members no longer need to spend more than 500 workpoints every day to go to the city and buy manure. In the 1970s, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Naion even published a booklet to introduce the Chinese experience of recycling organic wastes in agriculture. The FAO stated that “a cyclic change that returns the farming communities (including peasants and land) much of the constituent of manurial value which originally came into the town from the countryside in the form of food.

Recycling of Organic Wastes in the People’s Republic China, figure provided by Dr. Leung

In general, Dr. Leung regarded the fall of Mao’s era as a process of metabolic disturbance. In the late 1970s, the socialist toilet system no longer operated, as well as the traditional management of human waste was abandoned. At the same time, the country witnessed the rapid growth of chemical fertilizers in farming. As the ways of “cyclic change” are broken, the metabolic interactions between humans and soils are interrupted, but in particular ways (e.g., waste mismanagement, epidemic diseases, western hygienic measures, etc). Moreover, the idea of environmental hygiene splits from public hygiene to agricultural production. However, after all these changes, statistics show that 85% of the rural population still recycle household waste on their subsistence farms.

At the end of the lecture, Dr. Leung provided some of his thoughts about the “socialist history of shit”. For him, the study of excremental modernity is not relative but relational, which reminds researchers to study shit in a broader relational framework that connects the human body, nature, food, history, and technology. To conduct a relational study in this way is to challenge the systematic binary category of resource/waste, clean/dirty, private/public, progressive/backward, etc. Also, he emphasized the importance of reference through local histories and lived experiences, as he learned a lot from his mother’s personal experience during the socialist era.