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

Abstract

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.