In an ethnographic study based on interviews and participant observation undertaken while employed as a picker in a Michigan landfill, Joshua Reno takes us inside the hidden commode of production. He explores the cultural practices and conceptions through which the landfill’s workers and neighbors negotiate threats to health, dignity, and status of life in and around an endpoint in the transnational flow of mass waste.
Reno investigates the way schemas such as body, class, nation, gender, and race serve to animate, order, and disrupt the work of the landfill. He draws on anthropological literature on pollution, giving attention to the management of disgust necessary for the landfill’s operation. The workers seal their bodies off from impurities using gloves, uniforms, and boots, while scientific management of odors and effluents from the landfill’s “body” staves off grievances from surrounding communities.
The middle chapters focus on class practices and aspirations. Reno observes the...
