Social Analysis

The study of plastics reveals a disjuncture in time. Plastic production draws on resources from our deep geological past while driving an accumulation of waste that will survive into the deep future as a marker of our geological agency. Yet the apparently infinite replaceability of plastics narrows our horizons to the present of the eternally new. The ubiquity and disposability of plastic instills in consumers a time sense that is focused on present usage, disconnected from its oily origins and future fate. This introduction reviews the literature around the anthropology of plastic and argues that it has the potential to reinvigorate classic debates about the anthropology of time. We call for a temporal reckoning with the consequences of the mass production of plastic and its long-term destabilizing implications.

This article examines the temporal complexity of polyethylene plastics in Blantyre, Malawi. As the location of the country's main plastic manufacturers, all kinds of plastics flow through the city. However, various non-plastic times intersect with these flows, from rainy seasons to the sowing of maize, the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, and the availability of fertilizer. Movements of local plastics thereby fluctuate according to other times and rhythms. Recycled plastics, for example, are harvested, washed, dried, crushed, packed, and resold at some times of the year and not others, depending on various economic, political, social, and cultural factors. The resulting seasonality of plastics underlines that they are deeply embedded in the ever-changing complexities of social life, co-constituting contested socio-economic presents with their unique temporal and material qualities.

On a remote island in the Indian Ocean, plastics connect people to global supply chains, to one another through communal eating, and to ancestors as elements of shrines and offerings. While the island's human inhabitants depend on plastics, its wildlife is disturbed by the inundation of plastics on beaches that, following major currents, arrive from Southeast Asia. While most of the debris is unidentifiable, some items retain imprints from their former lives on land or at sea. People who regularly clean beaches find stories of connection and moments of beauty amid the massing. Engaging the ambivalences that many have toward plastics, this article explores how plastics, as an unintended consequence of their actuality, draw our attention to what it means to exist within the new temporalities of late capitalism.

In coastal Vietnam, everyday lives and production processes are entwined with the seasonal rhythms and movement of plastics in waterways. This article explores how aquaculture farmers and fishers interpret encounters with aquatic plastics, and how their perceptions of these objects’ spatial and temporal origins offer insights into their own discard practices. Through their repetitive movement, plastics become objects of ‘non-belonging’ and ‘out of time’, thus enabling a perception of incrementing relational, spatial, and temporal distance between the observer and the object. We argue that while the movement of plastics appears to connect different people, places, things, and times, plastics are perceived as objects of disconnect and blame, especially in the context of production where they impact economic activities and labor schedules, and their origin is traced to ‘outsiders’.

Examining how the polypropylene pots in which depilatory wax is packaged are active in the production of ‘feminine’ hairlessness in London's beauty salons and what happens as they are disposed of and incinerated, this article focuses on the making of bodies to explore plastic's temporalities. Centering the materiality of the plastic packaging (strong, light, flexible, replaceable, disposable), the article explores what the pots are and so what the pots do: what they effect, including how plastic comes to configure bodies in different and potentially harmful ways. Considering how plastic endures in bodies brings to the fore its multiple temporalities, heterochronic, layered and folded into one another.

Driven by critiques of the pollution caused by hydrocarbon-based plastic packaging, start-ups are currently developing biobased alternatives for the packaging industry. Mycelium and agricultural residues become material bases, and resulting compostable materials defy classification into plastics and bioplastics. The article focuses on such companies in Germany and Western Europe and seeks to understand the logics of their innovations by examining the temporalities that accompany them. The innovations produce different rhythms that affirm or break with dominant given temporal orders that are shaped by the hegemony of plastics. Emerging temporal consonances and dissonances in the context of the innovations point toward different modes of cultural change and different futures. The article therefore seeks access to ‘plastic time’ through the non-plastic and reflects on the power that temporal orders associated with plastics have on transformation processes.

Attending to the materiality of plastic offers a way to understand time as plasticized, uneven, halting, decelerating, and tidal. The massive use of plastic influences so much of the ways that we organize time and the pace of activity. This plasticization of time does not sit against a background of previous temporal stability, be it linear, circular, or another temporal framework. The plasticization of time speaks specifically to the widespread use of petrochemicals that brings about a particular, and particularly unstable, temporal politics. Attending to the plasticization of times through anthropological accounts offers an alternative to grand temporal narratives that are not adequate for the types of ecological and social disruption that we are witnessing the world over.