Show Notes
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#NewYorkCityDepartmentofSanitation #urbanwastelabor #participantobservationethnography #trashandmaterialculture #sanitationworkercamaraderie #PickingUp
Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City is a nonfiction ethnography by anthropologist Robin Nagle. Drawing on years of fieldwork with the New York City Department of Sanitation, the book examines the labor, culture, and civic importance of the workers who collect and manage the city’s refuse. Nagle approaches sanitation not as a background service but as a central urban system that shapes public health, infrastructure, and daily life. The book combines participant observation, institutional access, and first-hand experience on the job to show how waste removal depends on physical endurance, teamwork, and constant negotiation with the public. It also explores the social meaning of trash itself, treating discarded material as evidence of consumption, value, and urban life. The result is a study of labor that is both practical and anthropological, making visible a workforce and a municipal function that are usually taken for granted.