Caring for the Multiple Cares of Plastics

In this chapter, we approach the notion of plastic legacies through an engagement with the multiplicity of uses and cares of plastics as encountered in India. In particular, we aim to trace such plastic legacies through the ways in which they entail and incorporate other legacies—whether associated with religion, caste, class, gender, or bodily capacity and social responsibility. We approach this through an initial “ethnographic trajectory” that assembles a range of anecdotes. We then subject that trajectory to an analysis that focuses on how the environmental “care” of plastics draws from and is parallel to many other forms of care. As we show, efforts to affect the legacies of plastics by caring for them in particular ways can entail forms of caring that reinforce existing cultural, political, or social legacies. In addition, we attempt to theorize the multiplicity of cares through the notion of plasticity as it is manifested both in the complex and fluid repurposing of plastics and in the complex and fluid enactments of care.