In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries concerns about the environment and the
future of global capitalism have dominated political and social agendas worldwide. The culture
of excess underlying these concerns is particularly evident in the issue of trash which for
environmentalists has been a negative category heavily implicated in the destruction of the
natural world. However in the context of the arts trash has long been seen as a rich
aesthetic resource and more recently particularly under the influence of anthropology and
archaeology it has been explored as a form of material culture that articulates modes of
identity construction. In the context of such shifting often ambiguous attitudes to the
obsolete and the discarded this book offers a timely insight into their significance for
representations of social and personal identity. The essays in the book build on scholarship in
cultural theory sociology and anthropology that suggests that social and personal experience
is embedded in material culture but they also focus on the significance of trash as an
aesthetic resource. The volume illuminates some of the ways in which our relationship to trash
has influenced and is influenced by cultural products including art architecture literature
film and museum culture.
