Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage Dump by Kathleen M. Millar (review)

Reclaiming the Discarded is a cautionary tale on the dangers of unfettered urbanization and how the materiality of waste shapes social geographies. Kathleen Millar examines the refuse of capitalist production, where all that stands between salvageable material and the truly "unusuable" is an army of pickers (catadores) drawn from the urban poor on the periphery of the periphery. As "fast cities" emerge and metropolises become megalopolises, the issues Millar raises shed light on the social and political tensions acutely felt by those whose livelihoods depend both on the byproducts of capitalism and on state neglect. That in itself makes Reclaiming the Discarded a fascinating read. What makes this work truly engaging is its textured depiction of resilience in the face of unrelenting structural violence in Brazil, making it a perfect bookshelf companion to powerhouse ethnographies like Donna Goldstein's Laughter Out of Place (2003) and João Biehl's Vita (2005).

The ethnography begins with an unremarkable trip to Jardim Gramacho, a neighborhood and site of one of the largest open-air trash dumps (aterro) in the world. On the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, in the Baixada Fluminense, the neighborhood of Jardim Gramacho has been plagued by poverty, violence, and neglect. Yet, unlike the hillside favelas near Rio's city center and tourist attractions, few people beyond the residents and the reigning drug cartel Comando Vermelho were aware of its existence until the dump became the focus of art projects and films (culminating in an Oscar-nominated documentary, Wasteland, in 2010). Prior to closing in 2012, the dump received 8,000 tons of garbage each day—but not all of the trash went there to die. Every day, thousands of catadores worked to salvage bits of life: saleable materials, usable goods, and edible food—whatever could be found if one only knew where and how to look. Returning to the site for multiple visits over several years, Millar worked as catadora herself, living in the same community as the catadores. Through this shared existence, if not shared vulnerability, Millar comes to question much of what is commonly understood by precarity, the nature of work, and what it means to "live well" (28). Offering a nuanced critique of "scarcity as a persistent paradigm for understanding the lives lived in precarious conditions" (8), Millar looks beyond this scarcity to ask what motivates people to make the choices they do, how they derive meaning from livelihoods, and what social scientists miss by conflating wages with labor and work. To fill this lacuna, Millar advances the concept of "forms of living" which she describes as "both a livelihood and a way of life" (8), forcing us to contend with a simple truth: that the binaries that so often organize our lives—labor/life, formal/informal, work/leisure, trash/not-trash—leave much of human experience unexplained and uncategorized, not unlike the waste at the heart of the book.

Overall, the book is richly researched, with a thorough review of canonical and more particular texts, though Setha Low's work is conspicuously absent. Millar draws on notable ethnographies of urban Latin America, such as works by Matthew Gutmann (The Meaning of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City 1996); Teresa Caldeira (City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo 2001), and the aforementioned Goldstein and Biehl. She tackles the literature on spaces insightfully and engages critically with economic theorists. Subsequent chapters are grounded in her ethnographic work, and here the book shines.

Each chapter engages these questions through a different lens. The introduction grapples with existing literatures with Millar taking aim at several concepts (cycles of poverty, work as labor, informal economy) that her work proposes to unsettle. In Chapter 1, Millar outlines the grim socio-historical context that led many of the catadores to the dump and details her own early experiences. Interspersed with the powerful anecdotes of death and repugnance are humorous recollections that lace their...