Recent anthropological attention to more-than-human life has neglected the importance of race and racialization in human responses to environmental change. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with waste management institutions and Romani waste laborers in urban Bulgaria, this article invokes the concept of the racialized Anthropocene to destabilize the unmarked whiteness upon which the turn to humans-as-a-species-anthropos-is founded. Habituation is central to both EU waste policy and the generative strategies Romani street sweepers use to manage accumulated waste and the conditions of their racialized labor. I call these creative and quotidian strategies anthropogenic management. Anthropogenic management disrupts the resiliency paradigm that has become commonplace in analyses of how people respond to circumstances not of their own making. As such, it bridges the Anthropocene, marked by waste accumulation at a planetary scale, with the everyday conditions of racialization through the embodied labor of managing other people's trash. [waste, labor, race, Bulgaria] RESUMEN Atención antropológica reciente a la vida más que humana ha desatendido la importancia de raza y racialización en las respuestas al cambio ambiental. Basado en trabajo de campo etnográfico con las instituciones de manejo de residuos y trabajadores Romaníes de residuos en la Bulgaria urbana, este artículo invoca el concepto del Antropoceno racializado para desestabilizar la blancura no marcada sobre la cual el giro a humanos como una especie -antropos-se funda. Habituación es central tanto para la política de residuos de la UE como las estrategias generativas que los barrenderos Romaníes de las calles utilizan para manejar los residuos acumulados y las condiciones de su trabajo racializado. Llamo a estas estrategias creativas y cotidianas manejo antropocéntrico. El manejo antropogénico interrumpe el paradigma de resiliencia que ha llegado a ser lugar común en los análisis de cómo las personas responden a las circunstancias que no son de su propia creación. Como tal, hace el puente entre el Antropoceno, marcado por una acumulación de residuos a una escala planetaria, con las condiciones de cada día de racialización a través del trabajo corporeizado de manejar los residuos de otras personas. [residuos, trabajo, raza, Bulgaria] РЕЗЮМЕ Антропологично внимание към по-голям от човешкия живот пренебрегна значението на расата и расиализацията в реакциите на хората към промените в околната среда. Базирано на етнографска работа в България с институции за управление на отпадъците и Ромски работници, заети в този процес, тази статия обръща внимание към концепцията за расовия антропоцен, за да може да разклати неотбелязваната белота, на която стъпва гледането към човека като биологичен видантропоса. Привикването е централна характеристика e както за политиките за управление на отпадъци на ЕС, така и за стратегиите, които ромските работници, заети в метене на улиците, използват, за да се справят с натрупания боклук и условията на расово маркирания им труд....

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Bulgarian Roma living in the capital city of Sofia rely on glass for EU-era survival becauseof its role in food-jarring practices and its ability to be repeatedly used and reused withoutbreaking down. The durability of glass emerges as a salient material quality for ensuringa means of preservation in the face of everyday economic precarity. Glass's durability ismaterial and temporal: temporal in that it transcends political and economic upheavals,and material in that, unlike plastic, metal and paper, glass does not naturally decomposeover time. Instead, it enables structurally disadvantaged urbanites, like the Roma, touse homegrown food packaging technologies in order to survive in the era of EU "free"markets, plastic packaging and neoliberal discardability. The temporal and materialdurability of glass juxtaposes the precarious circumstances of those most engagedwith its contemporary reuse for whom glass enables both survival and a form of EU-eramaterial citizenship. However, EU regulations focused on recycling fail to acknowledgethe widespread practice of glass reuse in Bulgaria. This paper analyzes how EU policy,recycling company officials and Romani and non-Romani Sofia residents reconfiguredurability through different temporal materialities - and practices - of recycling and reuse.

This essay rethinks writing on “intimate labor” to ethnographically explore the intimacy of labor by attending to how Romani women waste workers in Bulgaria assert workplace friendships to lay claim to public space and cultivate life-sustaining solidarities. Under conditions of racialized and degrading labor, they play with their uniformed hypervisibility, catcall white men on city streets, and temporarily unsettle normative expectations of womanhood. With this disruptive power of workplace intimacy, street sweepers use humor and play to create collective pleasure for themselves and one another. As they explain that they “die so that white Bulgarians can live,” they also use their friendships to generate pleasurable forms of living, what they term “anything else.”

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