Amidst (waste) abundance: world‐making and struggles in hosting a municipal landfill in the Bolivian lowlands

In recent decades, solid waste has proliferated worldwide, becoming a pressing global issue. This article explores the role of Indigenous people dwelling within and upon emerging waste scenarios, with a specific focus on involved forms of sociality and ontological contestation. Drawing on the case of a municipal landfill sited on a Guarani community in Bolivia, it seeks to understand the social relations with humans and other‐than‐humans that are generated and through which its world‐making takes place. It introduces questions of alterity, dependency, and autonomy into the anthropological field of discard studies, shedding light on how waste may act as a generative force for Indigenous life projects amid dependencies, inequalities, and ontological differences. The article shows how living with the landfill involved the community in a complicated relation with the municipality. Despite the environmental degradation it caused, the landfill became a paradigmatic place of abundance that supported community well‐being through the creation of wealth. Moreover, it allowed the community to re‐create desired forms of relatedness and exert some degree of control over powerful Others (municipal authorities). Unfolding within the context of consumer disposal, the community's engagement with the landfill is part of a subordinating integration of Indigenous people into the global economy.