‘Old habits die hard’: discourses of urban filth in Swachh Bharat Mission and The Ugly Indian
‘Old habits die hard’: discourses of urban filth in Swachh Bharat Mission and The Ugly Indian
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“旧习难改”：《Swachh Bharat Mission》和《丑陋的印第安人》中关于城市污秽的论述
DOI：
10.1080/17447143.2018.1467917
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发表时间：
2018
影响因子：
1.5
通讯作者：
Luthra, Aman
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Luthra, Aman
当代印度城市废物危机的流行框架集中在公共行为改变的关键需求上。本文提供了一个探索性的研究的意识形态和工作的两个社会媒体运动-Swachh Bharat（清洁印度）使命和丑陋的印度人，社会媒体集团-强调需要灌输“现代”公民行为，不乱扔垃圾，并自愿清理公共空间，并探讨以下问题：什么类型的城市垃圾被调用在讨论城市污秽？这些讨论是否暴露了他们想象和援引的美学意识形态中的结构性（基于阶级的）偏见？这些讨论是否具体化了困扰印度城市卫生学者的公私二分法？在这些运动中部署的话语再现了殖民和后殖民的卫生叙事，作为一个“文化问题”，它建立在一个需要纪律约束的前现代城市主体的思想之上。通过关注行为改变，这些活动将废物理解为一个美学问题，而不是一个更复杂的基础设施问题。由于这些运动的重点是突出和庆祝特权阶层的志愿劳动，它们也可能混淆边缘化群体的经济必要劳动。
Popular framings of the contemporary urban Indian waste crisis focus on the crucial need for public behavior change. This article provides an exploratory study of the ideology and work of two social media campaigns –Swachh Bharat(Clean India) Mission andThe Ugly Indian, a social media group – which emphasize the need for inculcating ‘modern’ civic behaviors of not littering, and volunteering to clean up public spaces, and examines the following questions: What types of urban imaginaries are invoked in the discussions of urban filth? Do these discussions betray structural (class-based) biases in the aesthetic ideologies they imagine and invoke? Do these discussions reify the public-private dichotomy that has puzzled scholars concerned with hygiene in urban India? Discourses deployed in these campaigns reproduce colonial and post-colonial narratives of hygiene as a ‘cultural problem’ premised on an idea of a pre-modern urban subject who needs to be disciplined. By focusing on behavior change, these campaigns privilege an understanding of waste as an aesthetic problem rather than as a much more complicated infrastructural one. As these campaigns focus on highlighting and celebrating the volunteer labor of the privileged, they may also obfuscate the economically necessary labors of the marginalized.