ABSTRACT
On December 31, 2010, the municipal dump for the city of Vinh closed even while the new landfill site was still under construction. Over the next weeks, as authorities struggled to find a solution, piles of rotting trash flooded the streets (ngắp đường) at collection points across the city. Scholars have shown how in an age of diminishing public services, trash has emerged as vital materiality around which rights are mobilized and claims to citizenship are made. In Vinh, urban residents were outraged by the interruption to the waste management system. But rather than spark collective action, tenants in the housing blocks where I conducted fieldwork went about their daily lives, tossing their trash indifferently onto the growing heaps – just another moment of government inefficiency and infrastructure failure in social housing.
In this chapter, I examine the production of an apathetic public as a gendered response to recurrent breakdown of public infrastructure, using the example of municipal trash collection in a socialist housing complex in Vinh. As a civilizing technology, the newly built waste management system, engineered by East Germany after the end of US aerial bombing, offered the promise of urban modernity to a mostly rural migrant labor force. In mediating relations between state and society, the proper management of trash would produce both ordered urban environments and orderly socialist citizens. The performance of waste disposal served as a public display of membership in the social collectivity, as did the laboring bodies of female trash collectors, whose daily cleansing rituals showcased a functional, paternal state. And yet, against a historical backdrop of waste mismanagement among residents and municipal authorities, the accumulation of garbage at the dawn of 2011 signaled more than the threat of social disorder through cohabitation with filth. It also stood as a visual and olfactory expression of ineffective urban governance and the decline of political legitimacy.
