The Panamanian island of Colón, situated within the Bocas del Toro archipelago, is increasingly engulfed by environmental disturbances, deindustrialization, and mass tourism. The shrinking and fragmentation of its primary rainforest, the gentrification and privatization of beaches, and the toxic transformation of air and water signal more than just ecological degradation—they reflect the restructuring of island ontologies under neoliberal regimes. Within this 61 km² territory, the island is not merely a backdrop but a contested relational space, where entanglements of nature, capital, and colonial legacies continuously reconfigure both human and more-than-human, -garbages includes-, lifeworlds.
A powerful symbol of this anthropogenic shift is waste. Metallic, organic, plastic, synthetic—waste is entangled with the island and its inhabitants to the point of hybridization. This cohabitation alters inherited intercommunal and interspecies relations shaped by colonial histories. Mobilizing contemporary affects and postcolonial dynamics, waste—this cumbersome leftover that reproduces colonial management logics and stereotypes (Croteau, 2024)—both crystallizes tensions and gives rise to emergent relational forms (Haraway). What or who is considered ‘waste’? How do informal practices surrounding waste open up ways to observe marooning tactics that subvert these hegemonic mechanisms ?
Following Ana Tsing’s (2017) work, this ethnographic research adopts an inductive, multisensory approach centered on the gestures, uses, and narratives surrounding colonial waste (Liboiron, 2024). Waste is analyzed both as a tracer of hegemonic logics—colonial, extractivist, normative—and as a vector of alternative cosmopolitical imaginaries (Stengers, 1997–2003). Particular attention is given to the poetic, performative, and affective dimensions of waste, through a situated perspective informed by bicontinental experience.
A dedicated research platform gathers interviews, maps, photographs, field observations, and collective workshops to share and co-produce heterogeneous knowledges across disciplinary and social boundaries. This methodology seeks to articulate postcolonial critique, ecological engagement, and methodological renewal in the social sciences by valuing plural epistemologies and diverse narrative forms.
While some communities on Colón Island are already implementing adaptation strategies (e.g., 5% are constructing barriers against rising sea levels — Diéguez Pinto, 2020), these practices remain marginalized. This research aims both to valorize such grassroots resiliencies and to facilitate dialogue among stakeholders—residents, researchers, public authorities—and waste itself.
Ultimately, by interrogating enduring power relations, environmental hierarchies, and vernacular knowledge systems, this ethnography of waste offers a multifocal reading of the Anthropocene. It foregrounds situated ecologies, contested subjectivities, and emergent interspecies cohabitations born from that which is usually cast aside.
Anthropologie du Monstre 