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Les zabbâlîn sont célèbres et il convient de prendre cette célébrité en compte dans l’analyse de cette communauté d’éboueurs-recycleurs. Cet article propose de présenter les différents imaginaires qui ont été projetés sur les quartiers de chiffonniers ainsi que la façon dont ces derniers se les sont réappropriés en fonction d’enjeux locaux. Les visions projetées de l’extérieur sont soit extrêmement négatives, soit à l’inverse, elles versent dans une forme de romantisme. Ainsi le lieu de vie de zabbâlîn peut apparaitre comme une sorte d’hétérotopie, un lieu autre, tant les projections imaginaires semblent nous en dire plus sur ceux dont elles émanent que sur les chiffonniers eux-mêmes. The zabaleen are famous and this celebrity needs to be taken into account in the analysis of this community of garbage collectors and recyclers. This article presents the different imaginaries developed around those neighborhoods and the ways in which the garbage collectors themselves appropriated locally those discourses. The outsiders’ representations are either extremely negative or, on the contrary, they romanticize this community. For this reason, the place of living of the zabaleen could be described as a sort of heterotopia, as those imaginaries tell us more about those who formulate them than on the garbage collectors themselves.

This introduction proposes an analytical framework for over-research applied to the example of the Cairene wastepickers (known as “zabbaleen”). I will especially seek to underline the conditions of emergence of over-research processes as studied by scientific literature related to those issues. Publications emphasize a number of consistent points drawn from several examples of over-researched communities (marginalisation, experience of some kind of crisis, accessible localisation) which allow us to understand the mechanisms of zabbaleen’s exposure. I also suggest here to question the links between this important coverage of the community associated to the work of different kinds of actors (researchers, journalists, documentary makers, development associations etc.) in regard with a larger economy of knowledge (in a broad meaning) production and with entrepreneurialists and orientalists bias underlying this disproportionate interest., Cette introduction propose un cadre analytique de la surétude appliquée à l’exemple des chiffonniers cairotes (connus sous le nom de « zabbâlîn »). Je cherche notamment à mettre en avant les conditions d’émergence des processus de surétude telles qu’étudiées par la littérature scientifique produite à ce sujet. Cette dernière fait ressortir des points concordants entre différents exemples de communautés touchées (marginalisation, expérience d’une forme de crise plus ou moins récente, localisation accessible) qui permettent de mieux comprendre les mécanismes de la médiatisation des zabbâlîn. Je propose également d’interroger les liens entre cette médiatisation importante de la communauté liée au travail de nombreux acteurs (chercheurs, journalistes, documentaristes, association de développement etc.) au regard de(s) économie(s) de production du savoir au sens large ainsi qu’aux biais entrepreneurialistes et orientalistes qui sous-tendent cet intérêt démesuré.

This paper attempts to show that while the production of waste may be universal, the threat it poses is not. In order to explain and justify the question ‘what type of problem is waste’, the paper begins by attempting to, first, provincialise the ‘environmental’ framing of waste by examining the category's historically changing problematisations in Western Europe and North America, and, second, through a critique of Mary Douglas's work Purity and danger, to argue that waste should be theorised ethnographically rather than analytically. It then argues that, in Egypt, the materiality of litter and the sociality of waste work are sublimated into a religio-civilisational register based on the central trope of cleanliness rather than environment. It does so by considering various meanings and inflexions of the word ‘cleanliness’ in vernacular usage, the way the terms environment and pollution are used, naming conventions for waste collectors and anti-litter campaigns. © 2017 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

After the January 2011 revolution, new and unpermitted constructions on previously empty land went up across Cairo at striking speed. This paper explores a case of such land encroachments carried out by waste collectors in the neighbourhood of Manshiet Nasser in Cairo, Egypt. It begins with theoretical debates about the production of urban space, arguing that the de Certeauian paradigm, in which urban marginals poach or hijack others’ spaces evanescently, fails to account for the way such encroachments produce permanent new spaces rhizomatically alongside the pre-existing order. The paper then turns to a close examination of the events in Manshiet Nasser. Although in a broad view the actors are marginals living in the ‘informal’ city, the conditions enabling the encroachments were such that only the wealthiest and most powerful members of the ‘community’ benefitted. In a context of generalized ‘illegality’, the squatters rely on practical norms and de facto recognitions to obtain some degree of tenure security. Since these efforts rely on and play off legal norms even as the squatters violate them, the paper argues that property rights in this context should be understood not in classificatory terms based on the legal/illegal binary, but rather through a trajectory of ‘becoming-legal’: a ‘line of flight’ that approaches legality asymptotically.

Through a discussion of Egypt–China trade in PET plastic, this paper seeks to show how contemporary recycling economies do not all conform to North–South directionalities, nor to the other assumptions about agency, vulnerability and environmental damage that inhere in the ‘neo-colonial geographies of inequality’ paradigm. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to developing more optimistic and nuanced alternative framings of global waste flows. The paper follows a two-part structure. The first half provides background on the author’s research methods, the recycling business in Egypt and its ties to China before further outlining the paradigm the paper seeks to nuance, particularly as it has been developed through and applied to e-waste case studies and entrenched in the principal legal instrument governing transboundary waste flows, the Basel Convention. The second half of the paper, after some conceptual notes outlining and locating the author’s approach to the market in the literature, attempts to provide a few details of the Egypt–China PET market from fieldwork, focusing on two price-shaping/making processes: market fluctuations during the global economic crisis in 2008/09 and the quality standards criteria applied by Chinese buyers.

International audience; Through a discussion of Egypt–China trade in PET plastic, this paper seeks to show how contemporary recycling economies do not all conform to North–South directionalities, nor to the other assumptions about agency, vulnerability and environmental damage that inhere in the ‘neo-colonial geographies of inequality’ paradigm. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to developing more optimistic and nuanced alternative framings of global waste flows. The paper follows a two-part structure. The first half provides background on the author’s research methods, the recycling business in Egypt and its ties to China before further outlining the paradigm the paper seeks to nuance, particularly as it has been developed through and applied to e-waste case studies and entrenched in the principal legal instrument governing transboundary waste flows, the Basel Convention. The second half of the paper, after some conceptual notes outlining and locating the author’s approach to the market in the literature, attempts to provide a few details of the Egypt–China PET market from fieldwork, focusing on two price-shaping/making processes: market fluctuations during the global economic crisis in 2008/09 and the quality standards criteria applied by Chinese buyers.

International audience; This short paper shows how 'neoliberal globalization' is reworked from within by local actors who appropriate its symbols, practices, and ideas—often for ends extrinsic to the logic underpinning them at the origins. In Cairo, public-private partnerships with European waste management companies—a new development over the past decade—are not merely 'neoliberalism from the sky.' They incorporate longstanding aesthetic and symbolic concerns over 'cleanliness' and 'modernity,' recasting them in a vogue idiom, one that plays well with international funders.