Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure The Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfill

This article discusses scavenging and dumping as alternative approaches to deriving value from rubbish at a large Michigan landfill. Both practices are attuned to the indeterminacy and power of abandoned things, but in different ways. Whereas scavenging relies on acquiring familiarity with an object by getting to know its particular qualities, landfilling and other forms of mass disposal make discards fungible and manipulable by stripping them of their former identities. By way of examining the different ways in which people become invested in the politics of value at the landfill, whether as part of expressions of gender and class or for personal enjoyment, different comportments toward materiality are revealed to have underlying social and moral implications. In particular, it is argued that different approaches to the evaluation of rubbish involve competing understandings of human and material potential

O "CC" e a patologização do natural: higiene, publicidade e modernização no Brasil do pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial

The aim of this article is to discuss the relationship between consumption and changing habits through new industrial products related to health and hygiene, which were announced as the possibility of replacing the natural odor and industrialized by artificial smell. This would represent the cultural transformation of natural physiological functions, such as sweat, something unwholesome and socially repugnant and also a synonym for backwardness. The ideal of a hygienic, modern and deodorized find life in the media and advertising - in the modernization and expansion process in the Brazil post-II World War the privileged space for the placement and supply of new and abundant products that promised to cancel the threat of "body odor" - "BO" and replace it, by the "smell good", hygienic and socially enjoyable that could be bought.O objetivo do artigo é discutir a relação entre consumo e mudança de hábitos por meio de novos produtos industrializados relacionados à saúde e à higiene, que foram anunciados como capazes de substituir o odor natural pelo cheiro artificial e industrializado. Sugerimos que foi um processo social e cultural de transformação de funções fisiológicas naturais, como o suor e o mau hálito, em algo nocivo à saúde e repugnante socialmente e também em um sinônimo de atraso. O ideal de uma vida higiênica, moderna e desodorizada encontrou na imprensa e na publicidade - em processo de modernização e expansão no Brasil após a Segunda Guerra Mundial - o espaço privilegiado para a veiculação e oferta de novos e abundantes produtos que prometiam cancelar a ameaça do "cheiro de corpo", o "CC", e substituí-lo pelo "cheiro bom", salubre e socialmente aceitável que poderia, inclusive, ser comprado