Since 2006, Robin Nagle has been the anthropologist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY). She is the first to hold this title (though DSNY has had an artist-in-residence since 1977), which, the department claims, makes it the city’s “sole uniformed force… with its own social scientist.” As an anthropologist, she trained in fieldwork and the tools of social science; as a sanitation worker, she had a route in the Bronx.

One of Professor Nagle’s largest current projects has been the attempt to build support for a Museum of Sanitation in New York. In a city that has museums for each of its other uniformed services, as well as for sex and skyscrapers, this project has been met by a derision analogous to the invisibility many individual sanitation workers find in their interactions with citizens when on the job. Reviews of a preliminary museum exhibit Nagle staged last year treated it largely as a curiosity, not really a surprise in a city that wants its garbage out of sight and out of mind. It is often when focusing on the paradoxes of this attitude that Professor Nagle’s work is at its richest: many of her insights come from exploring the social energy and meaning of an accelerated elimination process that, in the effort to make a city’s garbage invisible, has created Fresh Kills, one of the only man-made structures massive enough to be visible from earth’s orbit.

Most commentary on the impact of garbage and consumerism treats waste either as material or as metaphor, but Professor Nagle’s analyses explore the tension between the two. One example: in a short history of New York’s first street cleaners—who organized as the germ theory of disease reshaped ideas of public health—Nagle noted not only that their work resulted in massive decreases in infant and child mortality, but that the workers’ uniform of a clean white coat reflected the era’s focus on hygiene and public cleanliness as markers of civilization and a healthy citizenry. One challenge of writing such a history is conveying what Nagle has called “the ripeness, the stench” of cities that was an everyday part of urban life for all but the most recent generations, a fact that has been so widely excluded from stories of the past and forgotten today.

Her next book, Picking Up, asks the question “What is it like to be a sanitation worker in New York City today?” Robin Nagle directs the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought at NYU.

—Alex Carp

I. “A LITTLE INTIMATE GESTURE THAT I DON’T THINK ABOUT”

THE BELIEVER: You’ve said that “garbage is very scary to us culturally, and it is...