The anthropology of waste, drawing on Mary Douglas’s seminal work as well as later studies of landfills, ragpickers, environmental crises and even social exclusion, is a prism through which to view and understand the crises of neoliberal globalisation. This introduction reviews the literature and identifies some themes in the anthropology of waste, some of which are explored in the subsequent contributions to this special section.

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In South Korea, 2011 was marked by the rise of a social movement against precarity, the emergence of which was dependent upon effective and affective mobilizing strategies amongst workers. The impetus was provided by a struggle at a shipyard in Pusan, where an activist held a crane occupied for 309 days. The role of affect in constituting neoliberal workplaces has recently received much attention in anthropology. The question of how emotions figure into the mobilizing efforts of labour, rather than those of management, however, has been overlooked. Hope and despair are two emotive themes amongst activists involved in the Hanjin dispute that are closely linked to the practice of suicide amongst unionized workers in the country. Since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, suicide has also become an all‐too‐ordinary response to pressures imposed upon an increasingly precarious Korean workforce. I look into the affective mobilizing cultures that have allowed the ‘Hope Bus’ movement to excel in Korea, and explore the less successful efforts that were made by Korean and Filipino activists to link up their struggles.

The US military presence in Korea has had unintended consequences in an entertainment district in Seoul, where competing performances of masculinity function as a key place‐making strategy. Itaewon's suspense – the uneasy positioning of the neighbourhood between allure and repulsion – arises out of a suspension of the area between contesting sovereignties, and at times allows fraternal bonding between an unlikely cast of actors. With Itaewon's multifarious identities increasingly becoming commodified, the democratic liberalisations (which have partly emerged from and partly acted upon the place of Itaewon) have ironically also opened the gates for rampant economic liberalisation.

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