Preface/Acknowledgments vii
Prologue: Any Given Sunday in Seattle xi
Introduction: Of Waste, Cities, and Conspiracies 1
Part I. Abject Capital
Scene i: It's Thanksgiving in Seattle 27
1. The Anatomy of a Dumpster: Abject Capital and the Looking Glass
of Value 31
Scene ii: Reckoning Value at the Market 55
2. Market-Publics and Scavenged Counterpublics 58
Part II: World-Class Cities, World-Class Waste
Scene iii: If You Build It, They Will Come 91
3. Place-making and Waste-making in the Global City 97
Scene iv: Like a Picnic, Only Bigger, and with Strangers
117
4. Eating in Public: Shadow Economies and Forbidden Gifts
123
Part III: Slow Insurrection
Scene v: "Rabble" on the Global Street 157
5. A Recipe for Mass Conspiracy 166
Scene vi: When I First Got to the Kitchen 198
6. Embodying Otherwise: Toward a New Politics of Surplus
202
Encore: A New Zeitgeist 233
Conclusion: Open Letters to Lost Homes (Political
Implications) 235
Notes 255
Bibliography 271
Index 293
David Boarder Giles is Lecturer in Anthropology in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University.
“Chronicling the work of the urban justice organization Food Not
Bombs, David Boarder Giles analyzes urgent and overlapping social,
economic, and political concerns common in today's global cities.
Giles engages with a range of scholarly disciplines and theoretical
arguments eloquently and elegantly, while offering ethnographic
details that are both vivid and convincing.”
*Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the
Sanitation Workers of New York City*
“In A Mass Conspiracy To Feed People, David Boarder Giles documents
the rhizomatic magic by which the anarchist direct action group
Food Not Bombs converts urban food waste into meals for the hungry
and hope for a better world. Along the way he intertwines his own
lived experience and a sophisticated critique of the contemporary
capitalist city to create a beautiful book that is itself a recipe
for a slow-simmering revolution.”
*Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge*
“[A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People] is appropriate for upper
division undergraduate and graduate classes on social movements. .
. . It is a must read for social activists looking to address
equity issues in a neo-liberal, capitalist world. Kudos to Giles
for providing such an excellent blueprint for ways in which the
detritus of capitalism can be used to address the ills of the
system."
*International Social Science Review*
“Themes of abject waste, abject communities, and the subversive
potential of counterpublics form the structure of [A Mass
Conspiracy to Feed People] and aptly carry the reader from the
quotidian bin into new political possibilities.”
*Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology*
"A Mass Conspiracy is an academic book with the aesthetics of an
anarchist zine, replete with side-bar soup recipes, reproductions
of FNB flyers, and vivid photographs of discarded food and
abandoned people. This, combined with Giles’ lively prose, helps
the reader through a dense theoretical argument. It also brings us
back to what really matters: who and what is being thrown out of
the towering heights of global cities, and what insights and
possibilities we can recover from the wreckage."
*Mobilization*
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