Objectified but not Materialized Theory: Human Waste Diagrams Under Erasure

This article questions the degrees of objectification and materialization of theory in material culture studies. It does so by examining the transformations and travelings of human waste diagrams, from a critique of economic externalities in sub-Saharan Africa to a tool of nonsewered sanitation planning in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia: How can a theory become a scientific object but it rarely matters (e.g. turning into matters of concern/care and transforming into material artifacts)? This article firstly follows the moments in the 1990s to 2000s when a waste theory based on an accounting of flows and leakages of excrement and money was objectified as new knowledge abstracted from postcolonial cities in Western Africa, where the sewer network coverage is very low or non-existent. It then continues with what happened when the diagram's latest version—Shit Flow Diagram—was translated from English to Indonesian and its components were applied, adapted, and ignored in Indonesia and a new element in the diagram, the chain, was introduced and became a synecdoche of the waste theory. It concludes with a reflection on the limit of diagrams and the salient operation of erasure in the objectification of waste theory therein.