Unmaking Waste

In Unmaking Waste, Sarah Newman draws on her expertise in Mesoamerican archaeology to boldly and ambitiously challenge readers to access pasts and conceive of futures in which they see not “waste” but reuse and renewal. Building on the legacy of Mary Douglas, Newman argues that “a history of waste in Mesoamerica looks very different—and for those who are most likely to read this book, much less familiar—than a history of waste in contemporary, urban North America or Europe” (p. 3).Beyond sewers and dumps, Newman attends to rituals of sweeping, potsherds beside temples, the burning of trash effigies, and pepenadores’ informal recycling. Drawing on her archaeological fieldwork from the Guatemalan highlands to central Mexico as well as pictorial manuscripts, archival records of legal disputes, and dictionaries of Indigenous languages from the colonial period, her premodern source base is varied. However, as provocative juxtaposition is key to her approach, Newman also relies on twentieth-century fictional travelogues (chiefly Italo Calvino's 1972 Invisible Cities), the photography project focused on modern household waste titled 7 Days of Garbage, news reports, and deft explanations of ongoing garbage-related projects. Unmaking Waste is not only a book for “past-loving creatures and archaeophiles . . . united by a backward-looking curiosity, a desire to ‘know’ the past by systematically considering its traces in the present” (p. 5). Rather, it is for a wider readership of all of us “inheritors of a ruined planet” who “share a forward-looking, unsystematic anxiety about the proliferation of material remains of the present as the lingering traces they will become in the future” (p. 5).Chapter 1, “Throwaway Living,” articulates four key historical conceptions of waste: first, a vision of filth-laden antiquity that overwhelmed short-lived hygienic efforts; second, the health risks that correlated waste to the spread of disease; third, the scale of waste produced by industrialization; and fourth, the idea of solid waste as threatening “pollutant” (p. 15). In showing the historicity of these arguments, Newman turns to heavy-handed quotes from nineteenth-century speeches and histories, which risks creating a simplistic straw man for the “commonplace version of history” (p. 17). Chapter 2, “Archaeologies of Garbage,” is a thoughtful overview of how the field of archaeology has engaged with and been shaped by commonplace understandings of waste. In a chapter worth assigning on its own, Newman's intellectual history starts with the study of kitchen middens, or rubbish heaps, and follows the rise of garbology, which presumed that trash in the present was comparable with trash in the past.The remainder of the book critiques this presumption that we know trash when we see it, suggesting that in ancient Mesoamerica “discarded materials were more than waste; they were . . . traces not only of an original object and its maker but also of the people, gods, ancestors, and other animate forces involved in regenerative cycles and ongoing flows of creation, use, and disposal” (p. 137). Chapter 3, “Cleanliness and Godliness,” turns in earnest to Latin America. Newman begins with a reading of the Quema del Diablo (Burning of the Devil) celebration on December 7, during which household trash and effigies of Satan are set ablaze in a ritual of purification. Using sources from colonial encounters with the Spanish, she draws on a robust scholarly literature that has shown how Christian discourse of sinful waste was overlaid onto Indigenous Mesoamerican perspectives.Waste need not be bad, and pre-Columbian Mesoamerica offers alternative ways of understanding. Chapter 4, “Dirty Work,” centers the descriptions of canoes of human excrement as public latrines floating through the Aztec capital. These systems collapsed with Spanish invasion, with disastrous consequences. Digging yet deeper into pre-Columbian norms through language and Maya imagery, chapter 5, “Things Left Behind,” illuminates the productive lack of equivalency between Mayan terms like *xex (“having a bad taste”) and *tzaa (“shit”) with English “trash” or Spanish “basura” (p. 114). Instead, Newman emphasizes the importance of sweeping as purification, meant as both a literal removal of detritus and ritual preparation requiring bloodshed (p. 121). Clearly not all Mesoamerican practices should be adopted literally.In chapter 6, Newman lays out a methodology for what she calls “anamorphic archaeology.” She explains anamorphosis, the reforming of an object through active viewership, and uses it to make sense of the puzzling remains of broken vessels at the palace of El Zotz. This writerly intervention, naturalized through Newman's careful prose, shakes the reader out of her comfort zone of causation analyses and forces her to see resonances between past and present and, most importantly, potential futures to sort out our own garbage, literally and figuratively.Readers will be interested in Unmaking Waste not only for its archaeological, cultural anthropological, and historical insights but also for its thoughtful engagement with what Mesoamerica means for the modern Anglophone world, drowning in once-used garbage

American Environmental and Regional History · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · History