‘Disease avoidance: from animals to culture’

A new themed volume on ‘Disease avoidance: from animals to culture‘ in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences provides some food for through when read against Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger. Douglas insists that we not read food taboos and other cleanliness rituals as medical-materialistic (ie, Jews don’t eat pork because of […]
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Beijing Besieged by Waste 垃圾围城

Film Screening at the Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, (70th Street), New York, NY 10021 WANG Jiuliang 王久良 2011. China. 72 min. Digibeta. Saturday, October 29, 2011, 3:00 pm Click Here for Tickets and More Information   With a population of about 20 million, the growing city of Beijing produces 30,000 tons of waste each […]
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Invisible Culture

I thought the journal Invisible Culture might be interesting to those of us who deal with some of the less visible aspects of cultural/social infrastructure like trash, hoarding, or sanitation work. The journal has just put out a call for reviews for an edition called “making sense of visual culture.” They’re specifically “soliciting reviews that […]
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Tsunami Debris Disaster Tourism

Two environmental research and advocacy centers, 5 Gyres Institute and the Algalita Marine Research Institute, are offering nine places on a 72-foot research yacht for $13,500 to $15,500 per person to view– and research– the ocean debris fields of Japan’s tsunami. The expedition’s first leg will sail from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands through the area […]
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Capitalism and Socio-Spatial Dialectics of ‘Waste’

Antipode, A Radical Journal of Geography, has just published a special three-article section on the Socio-spatial dialectics of “waste.” The articles follow a Marxist analytical framework and are nestled in a larger discussion of humans and/as “surplus.” Readers will find that authors are not experts of waste and its materialities, stocks and flows, but are […]
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The Life of New Materials

On Nov. 17 and 18 the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) and the Hagley Museum and Library will sponsor the conference, “The Life of New Materials.” Conference sessions will explore the ways in which the development, use, and re-use of new materials is an embedded feature of our industrial society. The conference takes the biographies of […]
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Discarding Values

Tucked away in the corner of September 30th’s editorial page in The New York Times rests a short letter to the editor sent in by Claudia Couch of Florham Park, New Jersey.  In the letter she refers us to an article about the disappearing practice of offering a condemned man or woman a last meal […]
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Garbage strikes and the imposed categories of modernity

There are few things that mess with what Peter Berger called the nomos more than a garbage strike.  If social order is indeed an ongoing matter of moment-by-moment construction, then the deliberate (and very political) act of leaving uncollected garbage on the streets is the ultimate form of shaking up modern man’s taken-for-granted notions of […]
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Dancing Discards

The Artichoke Dance Company choreographs and performs a number of pieces about ocean plastics and waste. They are performing “Your Planet: The Human Mapping Project” this weekend, where seven dancers dressed in crocheted six-pack holders chart the journey trash takes as it leaves land sources and makes its way out to sea. Audience members will […]
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“Going Green but Getting Nowhere” — from the New York Times

Gernot Wagner, an economist with the Environmental Defense Fund, argues in this New York Times Op-Ed that our individual efforts to recycle, use less water, or replace plastic bags with cloth sacks are merely token gestures. “The changes necessary are so large and profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action,” he writes. […]
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