Kathleen Millar spent over two years living and working alongside catadores (waste-pickers/recyclers) on one of the world's largest rubbish dumps, located in Rio de Janeiro's satellite city of Duque de Caxias and specifically in the neighbourhood of Jardim Gramacho. The result of Millar's research is an exceptional book, ethnographically thick and theoretically innovative. By sharing the shifting and ambivalent experience of the dump, with its smells, risks, rhythms and values, Millar was able to truly grasp, and skilfully convey, what it means to live as a catadora. Certainly, the hardship and violence that life as a catadora entails emerges in Millar's account. As Millar's companions remarked, her real first day as a catadora was the day she broke down and cried, exhausted by the tension, pain and fatigue. Yet, Millar is able to go beyond perceptions of the dump as ‘pure suffering’ (p. 68) to understand how it is also simultaneously perceived as ‘a refuge’ (p. 72); a place of tolerance, where even ‘life with addiction can be lived’ (p. 114), and a place of certainty; the dump is always there and catadores may always (re)turn to it.
In the first few pages of the introduction, Millar recalls how the first catador she met, Tião, told her: ‘You might leave Jardim Gramacho, but you almost always come back’ (p. 3). And this is indeed what Millar later observed during her fieldwork; over days, months and years, sometimes after a longer break, yet, almost inevitably, catadores come back. The central question that the book seeks to answer is: why? While prevailing narratives in academic, development and policy circles would assume the answer to be articulated in terms of need and scarcity, chapter by chapter Millar dismantles this paradigm and, in so doing, powerfully exposes and challenges normative assumptions of what a valued life might mean and what forms of work may be entangled in it.
In Chapter 2 we meet Rosa, a catadora who had found a formal job as a cleaner, with regular hours, guaranteed minimum wage and benefits. However, a few weeks into her new job, Rosa quit and returned to the dump. For Rosa it was absurd to be required to stay at work until seven o'clock in the evening, when her children were already home from school, and even though she had finished all her chores by the early afternoon. Millar understands how Rosa's life is characterised by instability, it is a life where everyday emergencies are the norm. In such lives, the rigidity and regularity of waged work clashes with people's needs and desires. It is rather precarious work, with its autonomous working rhythms, which more easily tunes into people's lives, enabling them to sustain relationships and making possible a shared existence in a present that is anyway always already precarious.
While the instability of daily life partly explains why people value their lives as catatdores, the other part of the answer is to be found in the profound self-transformation that this form of living entails. Millar's companions often remarked how they ‘adapted’ to life as catadores. On one level they adapt to the dump's smells and sights. Upon arrival people usually experience the dump in terms of abjection. Liliana, for instance, recalls how she ‘vomited everything’ as she saw ‘people picking up garbage’ (p. 54). Yet, with time, these experiences change, and the dump acquires a different meaning; no longer a pile of indistinct waste, the dump gains materiality, becoming perceptible as a collection of valuable plastic, paper and cardboard. On another level, catadores adjust to the dump's temporalities, in a way that ultimately shapes alternative worker-subjectivities. Once catadores adapt to precarious labour, to the absence of a boss and schedule, they could no longer conform to the demands of regular employment. The affects and subjectivities that catadores develop fundamentally signal a rupture with those which emerge within normative forms of capitalist labour. This break also marks catadores’ specific moral understandings of what constitutes a good life and what is considered ‘of value’ in life (p. 100). In unpacking how and why the money catadores earn ‘vanishes’ so fast, Millar realises that the way one spends money is intimately linked to the way one spends life, and here the values of enjoyment, pleasure and relaxation become central. From this perspective, one that accumulates money and doesn't spend it to enjoy the ‘good things in life’ is considered an ignorant person (pessoa ignorante) (p. 106).
Understanding the specificity of catadores’ subjectivities as well as their values and forms of life also allows for a different evaluation of what constitutes ‘politics’. In Chapter 5, Millar explores why the majority of Jardim Gramacho's catadadores left, or simply did not join, the relatively successful workers’ cooperative Associação dos Catadores do Aterro Metropolitano de Jardim Gramacho (Association of Waste-Pickers of the Jardim Gramacho Metropolitan Dump, ACAMJG), which started and developed on the dump. Millar retraces how ACAMJG, in its political struggle for visibility and recognition, eventually required that its members abide by a number of disciplinary practices, such as the requirement to schedule working hours and to receive payment weekly (as opposed to daily), the prohibition of bringing found food and drugs on the association's premises and of selling even part of the material collected to scrapyards. In short, to be part of ACAMJG, one had to develop new worker-subjectivities. Thus, as one catatdor put it, to leave ACAMJG was ‘to return to the dump’ and to its form of living (p. 167). In this sense, the act of leaving the association is not conceptualised as a ‘failure’ to organise politically, rather it is understood as a kind of ‘class critique’, a refusal to conform to the normative requirements of capitalist forms of labour (p. 167). Millar also invites us to consider the political potential present in other collective practices, such as in the habit of collecting with a partner (truta), or the existence of fluid ‘unions’ of people establishing camps on the dump and living collectively.
With her analysis Millar makes an important contribution to ‘informality’ debates. Discarding the binary distinction between the formal and the informal economy, Millar draws on philosopher Catherine Malabou and argues that the non-normative modes of work which the term ‘informality’ has tried to capture could be better understood in terms of ‘plasticity’, that is, something that ‘both receives form and gives form’ (p. 127). For instance, in its continuous effort to manage the work of catadores, Comlurb, the company operating the garbage dump, introduced the obligation to wear work vests. Catadores reworked this obligation by sharing, duplicating and circulating the required vests. As Comlurb had to respond and adjust to catatdores’ tactics in attempts to devise new strategies of control, it was effectively being shaped by catatdores’ own dynamics.
At the end of the book Millar returns to Jardim Gramacho once the dump was definitely shut down. She meets with Juliana, a former catadora now hired full-time as a cleaner in the local centre for social assistance. For Juliana her new job was a good one, yet she claimed, ‘if the dump still existed, I would be there. For sure’ (p. 189). Having become attuned to the meanings and values of life as catadores, we understand Juliana's longing for her lost form of living. As the paradigm which sees precarious work as the problematic source of precarious life is challenged, new questions arise. In what ways might we address the vulnerability and fragility of people's daily life while dismantling the normative ideal of formal, waged work? What forms of politics and collective practices allow for striving for more secure forms of living without reproducing normative values, aspirations and subjectivities? By pushing the reader to ask these questions, Millar's book opens new research avenues into the realms of labour, precarity and beyond.
