Zsuzsa Gille
From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History
The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=1037_1183_2685
&products_id=41653
A social and cultural history of waste, environmental policy, and
postsocialist transition
Zsuzsa Gille combines social history, cultural analysis, and environmental
sociology to advance a long overdue social theory of waste in this study of
waste management, Hungarian state socialism, and post-Cold War capitalism.
From 1948 to the end of the Soviet period, Hungary developed a cult of waste
that valued reuse and recycling. With privatization the old environmentally
beneficial, though not flawless, waste regime was eliminated, and dumping
and waste incineration were again promoted. Gille's analysis focuses on the
struggle between a Budapest-based chemical company and the small rural
village that became its toxic dump site.
Zsuzsa Gille grew up in socialist Hungary and was active in semi-legal
environmental and peace movements. Co-author of Global Ethnography: Forces,
Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World, she is Associate
Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Was State Socialism Wasteful?
2. Toward a Social Theory of Waste
Part 1. Discipline and Recycle (1948-1974)
3. Metallic Socialism
4. The Primitive Accumulation of Waste in Metallic Socialism
Part 2. Reform and Reduce (1975-1984)
5. The Efficiency Model
6. The Limits of Efficiency
Part 3. Privatize and Incinerate (1985-present)
7. The Chemical Model
8. "Building a Castle out of Shit": The Wastelands of the New Europe
9. Conclusion
Notes
Sources and References
Index
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