Human waste management, an academically overlooked yet universal human experience, comprises diverse, unfolding relationships between people, materials, and institutions. This dissertation follows these entanglements through a case study of the Placencia Peninsula, Belize, where rapid tourism development occurs amidst undersized, precarious waste infrastructures. Management arises within a web of negotiations—between pipes and pathogens, citizens and states, past aspirations and imagined futures. Through these tangled relations, waste reveals itself as more than a byproduct of human life; it becomes a measure of care, governance, and ecological balance.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation examines how non-human materialities—like water, soil, and the chemical composition of waste—shape the possibilities for management, how social institutions organize around waste as a collective problem, and how matters of care guide the discourses and decisions surrounding its treatment. In Placencia, tourism’s rapid expansion exposes the fragility of existing infrastructures, generating competing visions for the peninsula’s future: one focused on scaling up to accommodate growth, the other emphasizing local stability and environmental sustainability.
By framing waste management as an entangled process rather than a singular problem to solve, this research contributes to a pragmatic anthropology that attends to the material, social, and ethical dimensions of human life. It argues for understanding management practices not as static solutions, but as evolving responses to the ongoing negotiations between people, materials, and the worlds they seek to create. Placencia’s waste, like all waste, insists on being reckoned with—persisting as a reminder of both our shared vulnerabilities and our capacities for care.