South Asia in Motion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023. US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9781503635722
Life Beyond Waste by Waqas Butt is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore, the second largest city in Pakistan with 11 million residents. Lahore is a sprawling megacity that is “relentlessly expanding” through the conversion of agricultural fields into housing schemes. Part of this expansion has to do with the rising new “Pakistani middle class” that has migrated from smaller towns in the Punjab since the 1980s to find employment in the private sector or set up small businesses in Lahore. With this expansion has come a phenomenal increase in waste material and its processing, which is the ethnographic focus of Butt’s book. He argues that “waste work holds together lives and worlds across Lahore’s unevenly urbanizing landscape” (7), and that it should be understood as an infrastructure for reproducing forms of life in Lahore and beyond. Moving away from other accounts of the lives of waste workers which see workers simply as a materialization of the world-historical processes of capitalist expansion or climate change. Butt argues for an analysis of life and waste in the contemporary world that “trac[es] the contours of lives as they are actually lived in myriad forms, being embedded in multiple life-making projects unfolding across discrete scales of activity” (17). His account of life and waste in Lahore shows that forms of life in this city have been organized along the lines of caste, class, and religion.
The book begins with a fieldwork scene where Butt introduces two of his key informants by sketching out their everyday work and lives as sanitary workers and waste collectors straddling the formal and informal sectors: employment in the Lahore Development Authority and freelancing to collect waste from private businesses and households. Butt then takes us to waste workers’ neighbourhoods on the southern outskirts of the city where they reside and carry out the bulk of their waste processing work in jhuggian or huts made of straw that are prone to destruction and displacement by the ever-expanding housing societies of Lahore. “These jhuggian might be garbage for housing societies, but for us it is a home” (6), says an interlocutor who was forced to move three times in three years. Butt argues that waste work has provided relatively stable sources of income for these workers and their families, yet they are exposed to precarity and uncertainty due to cycles of dispossession and resettlement.
A key theoretical concern of the book is the centrality of caste. Butt argues that caste, class, and religion have intersected in Pakistan’s social and political life, often to the effect of eclipsing caste as a solo social category. This is important in relation to waste work because, following Bhimrao Ambedkar (“Castes in India” in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches. New Delhi: Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014 [1979]), “caste-based relations in the Punjab were not just a division of labour; they were also a division of labourers” (9). Waste work is not simply about the disposal and circulation of waste material—two of the key processes involved—nor is it about the social reproduction of waste workers only, yet it constitutes an infrastructure that embeds various entanglements of things, practices, and people: “any number of actors with their own intentions and life-making projects, while participating in reproducing life … at several interconnected scales” (22). Life beyond waste.
Chapter 1, “The Order Urban Life,” traces the historical development of the governance of waste in Lahore. Butt expertly tells the stories of how caste-based relations were embedded in waste work during colonial times and how they continue to this day. Chapter 2, “The Appearance of Things,” shifts the lens to contemporary Lahore with its rapid urbanization, high levels of consumption, and industrial expansion. This chapter sheds light on how waste workers mobilize social and political relations to get access to waste materials and waste work, as well as the role of the bureaucratic state apparatus in organizing “infrastructures of disposability” (61). Chapter 3, “Surplus and Its Excess” follows the infrastructure of circulation, the spaces through which waste material passes in its processing, such as jhuggians, junkyards, warehouses, furnaces, and manufacturing units. It demonstrates that the surplus generated in this circulation is used to meet workers’ needs and enhance accumulation by larger-scale intermediaries. Butt argues that unlike the exploitation of labour through wages in the formal sector, this accumulation is enabled by forms of exclusion in the informal sector. Moreover, he contends that this sort of informality underlies the formal economy in Pakistan, thus reproducing historical inequalities and uneven urbanization.
Chapter 4, “The Unevenness of Intimacy,” directly addresses the negotiation of caste, class, and religion in waste work in urban spaces. Waste collection brings waste workers closer to the households where it is collected from, which requires managing affective, material, and spatial relationships which create uneven intimacies that, Butt argues, are reflective of wider processes of urbanization. The final chapter, “The Possibility of Reproduction,” traces intergenerational trajectories of waste workers, which Butt argues, are “undeniably historically specific” but also reveal the workings of the multifarious processes of contemporary capitalism. These five substantive chapters are followed by a Coda where Butt narrates the story of the socially widespread disgust towards (mostly Christian) waste workers as a site of social reproduction: “mak[ing] it clear how affective relations, both to one’s self and others with whom one shares the world in common, have been reorganized as forms of life have congealed in Lahore over past several decades” (172).
Life Beyond Waste is ethnographically rich and historically informed. It is theoretically engaged with key debates on social reproduction in the age of capitalist expansion and the Anthropocene. It provides a window on forms of life in the world’s waste in Lahore and beyond, with attention to the underlying historical and contemporary processes of significance. It advances our understanding of caste-based relations in Pakistan where the existence of caste is impulsively denied in society and has been grossly understudied by its scholars.
Ayaz Qureshi
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh