Trash Talks: Revelations in the Rubbish
Elizabeth V. Spelman
Abstract
People’s notorious habits of disposal appear to have put them well on the way to making the earth inhospitable to life. But their relation to rejectamenta includes much more than shedding and tossing. Trash Talks offers a portrait of the intimate ties people maintain with the dumped and discarded. Scavenging with abandon from sundry sources, including Veblen, Darwin, Freud, Plato, Buddha, Milton, and Locke, the book explores the extent to which people rely on trash and waste to make sense of their lives and to shape connections with others. Examples are deliriously rich: Some people use others ... More
People’s notorious habits of disposal appear to have put them well on the way to making the earth inhospitable to life. But their relation to rejectamenta includes much more than shedding and tossing. Trash Talks offers a portrait of the intimate ties people maintain with the dumped and discarded. Scavenging with abandon from sundry sources, including Veblen, Darwin, Freud, Plato, Buddha, Milton, and Locke, the book explores the extent to which people rely on trash and waste to make sense of their lives and to shape connections with others. Examples are deliriously rich: Some people use others’ rubbish to gain otherwise hard-to-get information about them. Individuals trumpet wastefulness to proclaim superior social standing. They appear to think that there is a “right” relation to trash and that not having it betrays flaws in one’s character or very being. Some of us are intrigued by or in distress over the idea that evolution is a prodigiously wasteful process. In the ubiquitous heaps of garbage and trash, some see consequences of the clamorous dissatisfaction so worrisome to ancient sages, while others find confirmation of a flourishing consumer economy. People count on there being telling differences between those who know waste when they see it and those who don’t. While most may want to shove debris and detritus out of sight, many of their most impassioned projects involve keeping them resolutely in mind.
Keywords:
trash,
wastefulness,
rejectamenta,
Veblen,
Darwin,
Freud,
Plato,
Buddha,
Milton,
Locke
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190239350 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190239350.001.0001 |
