Untangling translocal urban textures of trash: plastics and plasticity in Addis Ababa

The great anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that dirt is never an isolated event but belongs to a system. But rather than being the by‐product of a systematic ordering, I argue that dirt is one of the places where urban assemblages and lives, of an improvised and ad hoc kind, are rigged together. Not matter out of place then, but matter making place. This paper explores the analytic potential of trash as a lens onto city‐making and concludes that it is one of the mechanisms generating the distanciated and hyperlocal social textures of urban social morphology. Picking through the social morphologies of trash on the Koshe Landfill site on the fringes of Addis Ababa, I trace some of its local and translocal social textures.