Duke University Press Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage Dump

In Reclaiming the Discarded Kathleen M. Millar offers an evocative ethnography of Jardim Gramacho, a sprawling garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where roughly two thousand self-employed workers known as catadores collect recyclable materials. While the figure of the scavenger sifting through garbage seems iconic of wageless life today, Millar shows how the work of reclaiming recyclables is more than a survival strategy or an informal labor practice. Rather, the stories of catadores show how this work is inseparable from conceptions of the good life and from human struggles to realize these visions within precarious conditions of urban poverty. By approaching the work of catadores as highly generative, Millar calls into question the category of informality, common conceptions of garbage, and the continued normativity of wage labor. In so doing, she illuminates how waste lies at the heart of relations of inequality and projects of social transformation. Review "A book that brings dignity to people otherwise considered marginal and reveals a progressive potential in work otherwise considered 'rubbish.'" Author: Dagna Rams Source: London School of Economics Review of Books Review “Through a narrative built around a constellation of persons and objects, Jardim Gramacho comes alive in this gripping ethnography of garbage-reclaiming work and life in Rio's urban periphery. Kathleen M. Millar resists facile explanations of life in the dump, opting instead to closely listen to her interlocutors' stories, find value in literal interpretations of their words, and take ambivalences and contradictions not as calls for authoritative intervention but as invitations to inhabit the subtleties and complexities of their formidable social world. Reclaiming the Discarded is beautifully written and its argument disrupts truisms that sustain whole fields of inquiry.” Author: Daniella Gandolfo, author of Source: The City at Its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima From the Author Kathleen M. Millar is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. About the Author Kathleen M. Millar is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University.