PROJECT 6: Mutilation and Mutability: the destruction of clothing in India and its reclamation
This project extends the material culture approach to the management of waste, following objects (in this case clothing) past their abandonment to their destruction and reincarnation, in this instance as recycled consumer goods with new “social lives”. The focus is on the shoddy trade.
Unwanted clothing in the West is discarded from wardrobes, entering the anonymity of the market through processes akin to sacrifice and secondary burial. As a corollary, an international trade in second-hand clothing has emerged, growing exponentially in recent years, and flowing from the EU and US to countries in West Africa and South-east Asia (Tranberg Hansen, 2000; Norris, 2005). However, it is now accompanied by a much less familiar version of ‘recycling’: here garments are bought in bulk by factories and mutilated, stripped, shredded and pulped into a fibrous mass. The mass is then re-woven into blankets and cloth for local garment industries. Northern India is one of the key sites in the world in which clothing is destroyed and reincarnated. It provides a key context in which to examine the mutability of matter, and associated rituals of destruction and transformation.
The project has two components. The first comprises a desk-based study of the global shoddy trade using secondary sources. This will focus on international law and trade policies, provide an accurate assessment of the scale of the trade, position India vis-à-vis new players such as Korea, and consider the likely futures of the trade. For example, the destruction of clothing to access wool fibres is only cost-effective when the price of new wool remains high, when capital investment costs make new technologies prohibitive, and when international oil tariffs make man-made fibre alternatives unaffordable. In addition, the effect of GATT trade rules and the recent phasing out of the Multi-Fibre Agreement potentially alter the economics of cheap shoddy goods. The second component to the project is ethnographic, linking the UK to north India. The UK research will focus on the two-century old shoddy traders’ market, based in Yorkshire and London. Initial contacts have been made with the Textile Recycling Association, Oxfam Wastesavers, and other recyclers in Bradford and Hebden Bridge, so access is not seen to be problematic. Research in north India (Panipat) – where both Norris and Miller have well-established field links – will examine the creative potential released by clothing mutilation. Located in both factories and with consumers, it will examine the ways new materials are given value-added qualities, through the constituent elements of their wasting and the new design process.
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© The Waste of the World 2009
