Anthropology: Analyzing a Garbage Collection of a Household

Anthropology: Analyzing a Garbage Collection of a Household
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Anthropology: Analyzing a Garbage Collection of a Household
What the Refuse Says About Me, and Those That I Live With
I live off campus with my family members. Every day, we discard our household refuse by collecting them in a bin, which are picked once every week by the garbage collectors. In the garbage bin, we collect different types of waste ranging from those that can easily biodegrade, for instance, food leftovers, to those that are difficult to degrade, for example, plastics and glasses. From the record of a one-week collection of the refuse, some of the recorded garbage includes 3 two liters plastic soda cans, fruit peelings, vegetable stalks, 21empty beer bottles, 6 empty cigarette packets, candle wax, and 21 used diapers. Other trashes include broken CDs, three metal meat packaging cans, two biscuits boxes, sweets wrappers, a broken string of rosary with a crucifix attached to it and a small box of used medicines. Some two different glass bottles of perfume, a bottle of shampoo, and another container of body lotion were also present in the garbage.
The collection of the refuse can be used to elucidate various things about the people I reside with. By looking at the types of the garbage, it is very clear that the house accommodates more than one person and these people are of different ages and maybe different gender. For instance, the presence of diapers exhibits the presence of a baby in the house. The availability of the empty cigarettes packets and the beer bottles shows that the house hosts adults who are might be of the mid-ages or old ages (Haviland et al., 2014). Although it might be difficult to identify the race of the persons living in the house by analyzing the trash, it is clear that those who live in the house are of urban lifestyle culture, people with substantial income capable of financing the urban lifestyle depicted by the types of packaging of the things they use in their daily lives. For instance, the metal meat packaging can may suggest that the people living in the house buy their products from shopping malls or supermarkets and store them in fridges for longer time before going back for shopping, owing to their busy daily schedules. The empty cigarette packets and the beer bottles may also suggest the presence of fun-loving or substance users in the house.
A Detailed Interpretation of the Garbage Collection
In modern archeological researches, garbage dump can the used to determine various things about people. Such things could be on issues pertaining to their socioeconomic class, race, age, health-status, number of perso...