O’Hare, Patrick. Rubbish Belongs to the Poor. Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons. London: Pluto Press. 2022. 218 pages.

This lucid and engaging, at times amusing, ethnography of waste-pickers in Montevideo, Uruguay, challenges readers to think critically about the role of waste in contemporary society, the nature of informality within the local and global economies of advanced capitalism, and perhaps most poignantly, whether people should have a “right” to urban waste as a resource and as a commons. Rubbish belongs to the poor thus serves as a summative title for this study, as an analytical point of departure, and as a normative affirmation for author Patrick O’Hare. The ethnographic world depicted in the book is as the waste-pickers see and value it, and as the anthropologist validates through a “defen[s]e of waste as a category” (180), a counter-invective against hegemonic and even progressive visions of waste elimination, hygienic cities, and circular economies.

Drawing from critical social theory and anarchist political leanings, this ethnographic study follows a long line of theorizing of, and fascination with, the urban poor, shantytown dwellers, the informal economy, and people living with and around garbage or waste. There is a particularly strong current of scholarship on these themes in Latin America, much of it cited by the author, but it is also more broadly reflected in the classic anthropological formulations of the “culture of poverty” (Oscar Lewis) or “matter out of place” (Mary Douglas), which have been used, and at times misappropriated, to interrogate both the internal sociocultural dynamics of so-called “marginalized” communities, as well as their role and place within the broader social order. The primary strength of Rubbish Belongs to the Poor, accompanying the work of others in the growing interdisciplinary field of “discard studies,” is in foregrounding the lived worlds and perspectives of these so-called marginalized people, and of centering and privileging the apparent marginalized spaces of urban informality as a taking off point, a staging ground from which to critically view and analyze society writ large.

The dominant, modern social order, what O’Hare refers to as “bourgeois infrastructural modernity,” posits informality as a pre-modern economic anomaly. According to this logic, trash is in need of scientific management, concealment, or ultimately elimination. The informal waste-pickers who cohabitate with trash, consequently, are primary agents of urban disorder and even criminality. Waste, according to this dominant view, is inherently dirty, useless, and dangerous if left exposed. Waste-pickers, who sift through bins and dumps, often transporting their goods by horse and cart, embody vestiges of tradition and backwardness hindering the forward march of modernity. For a middle-income country like Uruguay nestled in the global South, these assumptions and understandings often take on politicized dimensions with almost existential undercurrents. Waste-pickers become positioned as both an uncomfortable mirror reflected internally, and an embarrassing postcard to the outside world. For instance, the proliferation of street waste-pickers, disparagingly referred to as hurgadores, or rummagers, during the years of profound economic crisis at the turn of the millennium, became symbols and metonyms of national crisis. At stake then are not just questions related to the political economy of disposal and recycling, but also the “moral economy” that judges the human character of pickers as individuals and as a social category (22).

In Rubbish Belongs to the Poor, the protagonists- Montevideo’s clasificadores, or classifiers- come alive as fully fleshed subjects. Rather than matter out of place living in urban cultural enclaves of poverty, O’Hare demonstrates why and how exactly their lives matter, whether as crucial cogs in the local and global waste economy, as protagonists in the national labor movement, or as complex human characters with relatable needs and desires. His account thus avoids the stigmatizing narratives of the suffering subject that predominate in media and some scholarly accounts of the urban poor and the waste economy. After detailing an interlocutor’s memories of the dump as a place of children’s play, swimming, picking flowers, and other bucolic summer days, for instance, O’Hare concludes: “These images contrast sharply with the dystopian malaise of foul smells and creatures found in risk-based municipal and journalistic descriptions of dump sites” (64).

The author also depicts the intricate ways the lives of clasificadores are connected to local and global circuits of economic, political and symbolic capital. The book flips around the “waste-poor nexus” by highlighting a social world, “where rubbish is coveted rather than rejected, and where life is threatened by waste’s absence rather as opposed to its presence” (27). Urban waste, the symbolically stigmatized material substance which normative assumptions suggest no one wants, is instead subject to at times intensely disputed political claims between the urban clasificadores, the state, and private corporations. One of O’Hare’s central arguments is that the state attempts, often through public-private partnerships, to “enclose,” control and monopolize the urban disposal economy. Rather than accomplishing a hygienic modernity, he argues, the result is more often new forms of dispossession and capital accumulation that do little to ameliorate entrenched forms of social inequality. “Rubbish belongs to the poor” then is a rallying cry for the rights of the poor and the working class to the waste commons and through this to a means of livelihood, however complex and at times contradictory, that offers one of the few remaining avenues to evade the wage labor relationship and to “live freely” in a modern bureaucratic and stratified class society.

A second, unique contribution of this book is O’Hare’s comparative approach between experiences in Uruguay and the UK. O’Hare draws from the perspective not only of formal economics or (post)colonial politics, but of the commoners and marginalized. Some of these comparisons, in a fascinating angle, are drawn from his personal experiences of “dumpster diving” as part of an activist community during his undergraduate studies at the University of St. Andrews. While recognizing the significant qualitative differences in relative depravation and motivation for waste scavenging in Uruguay