Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage

Dump by Kathleen M. Millar (review)

Rosana Resende

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 92, Number 3, Summer 2019, pp. 975-980

(Review)

Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2019.0048

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/734030

Access provided at 24 Nov 2019 19:47 GMT from the University of Connecticut
BOOK REVIEW

Rosana Resende, University of Florida

Kathleen M. Millar, Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on

Rio’s Garbage Dump. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 248 pp.

R  eclaiming the Discarded is a cautionary tale on the dangers of unfet-

tered 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 “unusu-
able” is an army of pickers (catadores) drawn from the urban poor on the
periphery of the periphery. As “fast cities” emerge and metropolises be-
come 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, vio-
lence, and neglect. Yet, unlike the hillside favelas near Rio’s city center
and tourist attractions, few people beyond the residents and the reign-
ing 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

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 92, No. 3, p. 975–980, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2019 by the Institute for
Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of The George Washington University. All rights reserved.

975
Kathleen M. Millar’s Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump

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 her-
self, 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 condi-
tions” (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—la-
bor/life, formal/informal, work/leisure, trash/not-trash—leave much of hu-
man 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 canoni-
cal 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 criti-
cally 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 sev-
eral 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 macabre
reality into a theater of the absurd so that readers, too, are able to “arrive
beyond abjection” as the chapter’s title describes. Chapter 2 is where the
ethnography engages her main theoretical propositions about precarity
and forms of living. Here, she presents compelling evidence for the notion
that autonomy is a central concern for catadores and something which

976
 ROSANA RESENDE

the dump offers—in contrast to formal, less precarious work. Chapter 3

grounds these concepts further as the details of daily life on the dump
reveal the catadores as a complex group of people with dreams and plans
thwarted by “everyday emergencies” that are as much structural as they
are personal. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to the broader context writ large:
the role of COMLURB, the state sanitation agency, and the surprising-
ly nebulous distinction between formal and informal work. Through the
concept of plasticity, with all its attendant shape-shifting, Millar questions
bounded notions of economy, life, and livelihood. Chapter 5 describes the
result of worker efforts to formalize their mobilization through the coop-
erative Association of Catadores in Jardim Gramacho (ACAMJG). Millar
neither privileges nor discounts this important aspect that, once more,
blurs the line between the formal and informal. Her analysis is much richer
for taking into account those both in and out of ACAMJG (and their transi-
tions therein). Finally, the book concludes with Millar’s return to the area
after the dump’s closing.
Individual anecdotes form pieces of the puzzle Millar lays out into a
panoramic display. Someone mentions that money earned on the dump
is “cursed” and thus it does not stay (last). A voice corroborates. Another
explains: the curse comes from dead bodies—but is it the bodies that ar-
rive as such or the bodies resulting from accidents on the dump? If money
is not cursed, what else can account for how quickly it disappears? One
catador, Vidal, suggests addictions, a more mundane but no less damning
force. Through these voices, catadores in Reclaiming the Discarded mani-
fest a life that is hard, dirty, uncertain—but also one to which they con-
tinuously return. They return each day, even after promising never again,
once “better” opportunities prove disappointing. Millar understands this
is a difficult idea to grasp: this stubborn return to the condition of catador
underscores much of her analysis. What but the most desperate of situa-
tions could compel someone day after day to pick through that which oth-
ers have discarded? Sifting through what is dirty or putrid, even corpses,
all while risking disease, injury, or death to carefully select scraps that
someone else may wish to buy? What Millar makes clear is that the lives of
catadores, while undoubtedly hard, are not singularly defined by struggle.
Life on the dump may begin in desperation but Millar argues that wageless
work offers something formal employment does not, a form of relational
autonomy that, she claims, better aligns with the catadores unstable lives
and their shifting needs.

977
Kathleen M. Millar’s Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump

This concept of relational autonomy, like contigent agency, helps elu-

cidate the relationship between structural constraints and individual free-
doms. The centrality of autonomy, fluid if incomplete, cannot be under-
stated as a concern for catadores. Relational autonomy helps clarify the
seemingly irrational decision to leave a job with stability and a signed labor
ID card to return to the dump. At the dump, workers can decide when to
work and for how long; they can associate or disassociate at will with
ACAMJG; they can choose the material to sift for. They can even circum-
vent the attempts to formalize their work by city management through
COMLURB. For people whose relationships with authority have mostly
been negative or inadequate and for those whom “everyday emergencies”
are the norm, this relational autonomy makes them uniquely adapted to
life on the dump. If it is true that “unstable living destabilizes work” (71),
then the catadores in Reclaiming the Discarded create stability by seeking
work that can accommodate their lifestyle. This does not erase the cruel
irony that adaptability to life on the dump is precisely what makes them
maladapted to life outside of it.
As ethnography, Reclaiming the Discarded is very compelling. Millar’s
textured storytelling weaves the catadores’ words with her own reflec-
tions. To read it is to care about their lives: to laugh alongside them when
they laugh at seemingly horrifying events like finding severed hands at the
bottom of an improvised soup, or to cry at Rose’s recollection of being
abandoned by her father in a public square, or to believe that the money
earned on the dump is cursed. While the objectively harsh day-to-day ex-
istence in Jardim Gramacho is a product of so many failures—of the state,
society, global economic trends, and even of the self—readers will not get
the sense that catadores see themselves as failures. Rather, as exempli-
fied by Glória’s incisive observations when organizing with ACAMJG and
later when touring the new solid waste treatment facility put in place of the
dump, catadores demonstrate an acute sense of critical citizenship and a
profound awareness of the implications of their work.
Millar’s last chapter, however, is somewhat frustrating. Returning after
the eventual closing of Jardim Gramacho in 2012, she gives what has
become an ethnographic convention: updates on the people in earlier
chapters and the new conditions they now experience, as well as new
descriptions of old field sites. She tells the fate of catadores as a collective
(a lump sum payment that seems only slightly less cursed and volatile than
dump earnings) and encounters several individuals, none of whom seem

978
 ROSANA RESENDE

to be better off without the dump. Whether frustrated by the rigid struc-
tures of formal employment like Eva, wistful for the bustling energy of the
dump like Irmã, or simply discarded by structural neglect like Leonel and
Vidal, Millar shows that the closing of the dump offers no closure for its
workers nor for the reader. Her narrative is poignant and the implications
heartbreaking, especially considering how much harder life must be since
2012 amid heightening economic and political woes in Brazil. The intensity
of the human drama and frustrating irresolutions in the book’s conclusion
offered a missed opportunity to pivot back to Millar’s theoretical underpin-
nings and broader implications. Much as Millar had to learn to feel for the
right kind of plastic, we as readers are left feeling for the right conclusions
to this work. Concepts like relational autonomy and return to the dump are
alluded to but not explicitly engaged. Absent, too, from the final chapter
is Millar’s theoretical frame of “forms of living,” which she argues “allows
us to ask what is entailed in producing and reproducing life without reify-
ing the economy as a universal, eternal, and essential domains of social
worlds” (16). This begs the question: if the closing of the dump fundamen-
tally disorients the universe of the catadores, then does this not also reify
the very centrality of economic activity in their lives?
Jardim Gramacho’s workers represent the quintessential social out-
casts. In this work, Millar reclaims lives largely ignored by Brazilian society
as central to the functioning of one of its main metropolises and casts
them as emblematic of some fundamental questions about the relation-
ship between work, life, and community. Reclaiming the Discarded cannot
offer readers satisfying outcomes for the lives it portrays, yet in raising
crucial questions about how anthropology approaches empirical works,
it should offer something in the way of closing questions. Beyond this
limited critique, however, Millar’s ethnography is rich and her contributions
are sound; readers will undoubtedly reflect on those questions whether or
not they are made explicit. As readers, we may never quite grasp why the
catadores kept on choosing the dump, but by the end of this compelling
ethnography, we come to accept the words of Juliana when she claims
that, “if the dump still existed, [they] would be there. For sure” (190). n

References:
Biehl, João G. 2005. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Caldeira, Teresa P. R. 2001. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

979
Kathleen M. Millar’s Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump

Goldstein, Donna M. 2003. Laughter out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gutmann, Matthew C. 1996. The Meaning of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Walker, Lucy, dir. 2010. Wasteland. Film, 120 min. Almega Projects and O2 Films.

980