Zsuzsa Gille.

From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

x+250 p. ISBN 978-0-2531-1692-5.

Zsuzsa Gille’s book is based on PhD research conducted at the University of California more than a decade ago. The approach is inspired primarily by the ethnographic methods, as well as by the history and sociology of the environment. Gille argues that the traditional image of socialist countries as territories full of pollution—the idea “that state socialism was wasteful, in the sense of squandering resources and in the sense of being full of wastes” (3)—should be reassessed. Let us be clear about this claim: Gille is not denying that there was pollution in former communist countries. But she stresses the complexity of socioeconomic (and cultural) systems in which waste was not ignored either by the population or by the authorities but, on the contrary, was at the center of public thought and action. Thus her topic is “the changing concept of waste” (35) in Hungary from 1948 to 2004, in a from-below perspective constructed through archival material, personal observation, press articles, and interviews. She describes three stages of Hungary’s “socialist” approach to waste: the accumulation of metal in the 1940s and 1950s, tentative steps towards recycling from 1968 through the 1980s, and widespread incineration since the 1990s. In the short but stimulating introduction, Gille proposes to “advance a sociological theory of waste.” Waste, she argues, is a “hybrid, simultaneously social and material” (27) product of human activity and politics, a “liminal, boundary object” (23) worthy of study