Anthropology of waste: a research agenda for the study of cities in the era of climate change

Abstract

The article theorizes the anthropology of waste as a field of knowledge appropriate for thinking and acting in the contemporary world marked by climate change. Responding to the Anthropocene and the subversion of ‘modern’ boundaries, waste is taken here as a privileged analytic framework for understanding how cities have become reconfigured as ‘Anthropocenic urban landscapes.’ By defining the anthropology of waste as an ‘epistemology of the Anthropocene,’ the text provides a conceptual panorama of the contemporary debate from which a set of theoretical, methodological and political questions emerges. The concept of ‘residual infrastructures’ is explored through two ethnographic cases based in Rio de Janeiro, demonstrating the potential of waste to renew the anthropology of cities by articulating the growing fields of waste and infrastructure studies. In the article’s conclusion, the politics of waste, which emerges from residual infrastructures, is also conceived as a politics of knowledge, outlining a research agenda for this expanding field of studies and indicating possible ways forward in an uncertain future.