ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book demonstrates the complex, unbalanced relationship between the powerful and the marginalised, and how power mediates and changes the waste pickers' lives. The first palpable feature of their daily life that stands out is their material and socio-cultural decay. This is closely followed by a sense of the extreme alienation of the adults of the community, from the state and mainstream society and their focused participation in their non-formal waste business. A direct counterpart lies in a similarly ghettoised community of black people in the US city of Chicago, wherein urban desolation is translated into collective demoralisation, registered in feelings of dejection, dread and anger, alcoholism and drug abuse, depression and assorted mental afflictions. Consciously or otherwise, the waste pickers always abstain from the wider structure of mainstream social space, creating their own sub-field.
