364 No 5 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE Olga Brednikova, Olga Tkach ‘The Dirty Countryside’ and ‘The Littered City’ (Everyday Practices of Dealing with Rubbish in Different Communities) ‘Rubbish Societies’ Social life is made up of more than just human relations. According to Bruno Latour, things, or ‘non-humans’ [Latour 2004: 5], are also actively included in the social order; they can even ‘be seen as actors (active participants) in society’s functioning’ [Gladarev 2006: 99]. Rubbish – conventionally speaking ‘things that have been and gone’ - also possesses the necessary attributes to be active and to have an influence on human life. This is manifest in the language which accompanies and serves the phenomenon of rubbish. Thus in Russian public discourse per- haps the most widespread term is the phrase ‘the fight against rubbish’. In this way rubbish is not simply an active participant in our lives but we are regularly ‘at war’ with it, and one cannot say for sure in whose direction the balance of power will tip at a given moment… The topic of rubbish is by no means peripheral in social discourse, and, as a rule, people talk and write about it as an ecological problem or, to use alarmist terminology, as an ‘ecological catastrophe’. In our daily routine, however, this ‘struggle against rubbish’ is just a routine and everyday practice, and if the customary status