In capitalist systems, waste lies at the core of the most crucial ecological, geopolitical, economic, and social challenges. The issues of pollution and its devastating consequences reveal the expansionist nature of the human species – which has gone so far as to saturate space with debris swirling in orbit (Lepawsky, 2016). They also shed light on the shared nature of our global “world” and the profound inequalities that structure it (Hornborg, 2018). It is indeed the wealthiest nations – those most eager to accumulate ever more wealth through the ideology of growth – that produce waste disproportionately.
As scholars committed to the critical nature of the social sciences, we are convinced that waste has, from this point of view, considerable power to help us think about and observe capitalism, its nature, its subjects, and its expansionism. We thought this perspective would be of particular interest for the Journal des Anthropologues, which, unlike many other revues in the humanit...




