DR. GARBAGE.(The Talk of the Town)

There is a saying among the rank-and-file members of the Department of Sanitation, otherwise known as san men, or New York's Strongest: "You can go your whole life without ever having to call a fireman, and if you're lucky you'll never have to call a cop, but you want to see a sanitation worker every day." Robin Nagle, the director of N.Y.U.'s Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought, cited this adage the other day in the course of explaining her new gig as the D.S.N.Y.'s official anthropologist-in-residence, a role that seems to involve at least as much cheerleading as it does scholarship. "If every anthropologist in the country folds up his research kit and goes home, the world isn't necessarily going to notice," she said. "But, if every san man in the world packs up his kit and goes home, we're in trouble."

The position is unpaid, and comes with the blessing of Sanitation's artist-in-residence, Mierle Laderman Ukeles (also unpaid). (Her conceptual work "Touch Sanitation," completed in 1980, involved her shaking hands with eighty-five hundred san men.) Nagle's office remains at N.Y.U., but her field work, in her first few weeks on the job, has taken her to Rocco DiRico's auto-repair shop, off Queens Boulevard, where the trucks and street sweepers get serviced, and to Floyd Bennett Field, where employee training takes place. "I'm putting together a presentation for new hires, so that people will understand the legacy," she said, sitting behind her desk, on which she'd neatly stacked a few issues of the magazine Waste Age next to a book called "High Tech Trash." ("It's really gripping reading," she said.)

Nagle, who is forty-five, has been researching the Department of Sanitation for the past several years, while working on a book, "Picking Up." At first, the san men were convinced that she was a plant, from one of various surveillance agencies. "We are from different worlds," she acknowledged. "I have tried to close the gap between us. I walk in, I'm female, I'm an egghead, I'm older, I have a Ph.D.--for some reason, they foreground that. My response is 'La-di-fucking-da, I have a Ph.D. Whatever.' "

She ...