Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Waste is a quotidian facet of all societies. All societies discard things; all societies have to deal with what remains of things, from human and animal bodies to vegetable peelings; and all societies are shaped through value regimes which acknowledge waste and/or rubbish as a category, albeit that they vary considerably in their determination of what exactly might befit this category, in how much matter is placed in this category, and what they do with it. While disciplines such as archeology and anthropology and interdisciplinary fields such as material culture have long recognized the disclosing capacities of waste, and while others (notably cultural studies) have begun to explore its metaphorical purchase, sociology largely has left waste alone ( O'Brien 1999 ). This silence is unlikely to remain, for theoretical and empirical reasons. Together with its close theoretical referent excess, waste poses questions which go to the heart of current sociological debates about materiality and mobility, about reflexivity and subjectivities, and about commodity exchange. Waste has begun to be good to think through and not just about. But waste itself matters, increasingly. What happens to the remains of things, and what should happen to them, is now at the forefront of political debate, globally, nationally, and locally. Rubbish defines us: it places us in the world and our relation to ... log in or subscribe to read full text