Beyond the Box: The Material and Human Dimensions of Containerized Logistics

Abstract

The modern shipping container has revolutionized our world, generating a massive amount of socio-economic connections spurred by constant movement along the trading routes of our planet. Literature on containerization typically frames it through related transport modes, focusing on logistical and economic aspects such as port operations and efficiency, intermodal connectivity, and global trade flows and volumes. Within that literature, however, containers themselves are most often portrayed as inanimate objects or mediums that passively contain whatever is placed inside them without having a role outside that limited function of containment. Even the function of transportation itself is relegated more actively to the ships, trains, or trucks carrying containers. As a result, little has been done to address shipping containers as animate objects that possess a direct material relation to human bodies, and that enable intricate webs of social relations and activities through their continuous movement and life cycle. Considering the exhilarating potential anthropological avenues that can be taken to expose the multifarious networks created by the constant flow of containers, this thesis provides a literature review that challenges the perception of the container as a mere “box” passively carrying goods from one point to another. First, the thesis examines how the container actively shapes connections between people and objects and reconfigures entire structures within today’s sophisticated supply chain network, and even beyond. Second, the thesis examines how social and anthropological theory can enable an object of containment such as the shipping container to “speak for itself” as an entity with agency. To achieve its intended purpose, this thesis will be navigating through two approaches, both of which seek a common goal: bringing the container to life and making it an active object. One approach aims to make the container more active by association to human life and the social. The other approach seeks to animate the container by treating it as an ‘entity’ of its own that possesses agency, whether in motion or idle, while situating it within a plane of hybrid knots that form mutually transformative relations.