While waste is often framed as the disposable excess of capitalism, and while those who work with waste are similarly framed as disposable labour functioning only to clean up and hide the excess of others, Waqas Butt’s detailed ethnography of waste infrastructures in Lahore demonstrates just how central the waste economy is to the organisation and functioning of the city and to the reproduction of life itself. Based on two years of ethnographic research, Life Beyond Waste skilfully moves between the micro, everyday worlds inhabited (and created) by waste workers, and the macro, historical and structural processes that have invisibilised the work surrounding waste even as the production of waste has proliferated under an increasingly consumerist, capitalist economy. Drawing from the insights of Marxist feminists’ theories of social reproduction, Butt argues that waste is central to the reproduction of urban life across three axes: the reproduction of caste-based relations in the contemporary period; the reproduction of an urban form in which the middle and upper classes are dependent on the labour of workers from low/non-caste backgrounds; and the reproduction of life and livelihoods for waste workers themselves.

Each of the chapters carefully unpacks particular historical and spatial layers related to waste infrastructures in Lahore. Chapter One begins with the colonial period, documenting how the British colonial state began to conceive of populations as ‘publics’ to be managed through the creation of an extensive technical, legal, and bureaucratic apparatus tasked with imposing ‘order’ on an unruly native population. This chapter also highlights how the colonial apparatus incorporated the Dalit, Chura caste as ‘sweepers’ into municipal departments across North India and the Punjab as a means of managing urban sanitation, thus embedding caste relations into the urban infrastructural fabric—a pattern that has persisted in the postcolonial period.

Chapter Two focuses on the postcolonial era, particularly the period of rapid urbanisation, population growth and increased consumption since the 1980s. This chapter provides a detailed mapping of the web of hierarchical relations that undergirds Lahore’s contemporary waste infrastructure through the stories of various individuals occupying different tiers of this economy. From the daroghah, who acts as a mediator between the Solid Waste Management Department and waste workers, political coordinators who maintain patronage networks, to municipal sanitation workers, and finally informal waste workers, who occupy the lowest and most precarious rung of the waste economy, Butt demonstrates how the modern bureaucratic state attempts to organise and manage the waste economy across different spatial scales. Reading this chapter, I also wondered about the impact of privatisation on the management of waste in Lahore over the past decade, not mentioned likely because it did not affect the particular sites where the author was conducting his fieldwork.

In Chapter Three, Butt takes the reader through the various spaces in which waste circulates as part of the informal economy. This chapter engages with the question of informality, which has been extensively debated in urban studies, particularly in the Global South where the vast majority of workers are employed within the informal economy. Through a detailed description of how waste is shifted, sorted, and sold, Butt documents the extensive process of generating surplus from waste materials, which sustain the livelihoods of informal waste workers, small-scale kabarian (junkyard dealers), and larger-scale kabarian and bioparian (intermediaries). This chapter highlights the ways in which the informal and formal economies are intertwined, and how processes of surplus generation from waste both reproduce life worlds and social/spatial inequalities.

While previous chapters focused largely on the bureaucracy and infrastructure of waste work, the remaining two chapters examine the material and affective relationships between waste workers and middle-class households and amongst waste workers and their kin. Those engaged in the removal of waste occupy a contradictory position within the city, being pushed to the peripheries and invisibilised while also being allowed into the most intimate, private spaces of middle and upper-class households. The discussion in Chapter Four builds on the classic work of Mary Douglas (2002) on purity and pollution in the maintenance of caste boundaries and has parallels with much of the work on domestic labour which demonstrates how class and caste boundaries are maintained within private spaces through processes of distancing and interdependence—what Butt describes as ambivalent forms of attachment (p. 117). This chapter also highlights how caste boundaries are maintained amongst waste workers themselves through spatial and social distancing practiced by those who claim lineage from higher caste backgrounds and those from Dalit/non-caste groups. These mediations take place under the shadow of an increasingly fraught social and political environment in which the looming threat of blasphemy hangs over members of the Christian community in particular who must constantly watch their words and movements to protect themselves from violence.

The final chapter of the book (Chapter Five) looks more closely at the exhausting work of building a life through waste on the peripheries of the city. The chapter documents the intergenerational struggles of informal waste workers who have experienced multiple waves of dispossession and displacement from Partition to the present. Most of these workers live in a constant state of uncertainty on the peripheries of an ever-expanding city where they are subject to the whims of speculative real estate markets. As most informal waste workers have no access to the formal banking system, most survive within a constant cycle of debt, borrowing money from relatively more privileged (although also often indebted) members of the waste economy to maintain their precarious existence. The chapter describes how the work of collecting, sorting, and selling waste along with the insecure conditions in which this work takes place takes a profound toll on the bodies of workers, leading to multiple forms of illness and exhaustion.

Life Beyond Waste makes a series of critical interventions to several fields including urban studies, the study of caste, capitalism and the Anthropocene, the ethnography of infrastructures, and of course, the anthropology of Pakistan more generally. One of the most valuable contributions of Butt’s rich ethnography is the focus on caste, which is a category that has been largely neglected in the study of urban Pakistan. While it was assumed within Muslim nationalist imaginations that caste would disappear with the creation of Pakistan as the remnants of ‘Hindu culture’ were gradually purged, Butt’s work clearly demonstrates how caste structures have persisted even as they have evolved and been overlaid by structures of class and religion-based hierarchies in the postcolonial period. Life Beyond Waste demonstrates how, despite its hidden nature or perhaps partially because of this, caste remains central to the spatial, social, and economic organisation of the city.

Furthermore, while recent years have witnessed a growing body of detailed ethnographic studies of processes of urbanisation in Pakistan, much of the focus has remained on more overt forms of violence (e.g. political violence). This is particularly true of the literature on Karachi. However, few studies focus on more covert, subtle forms of structural violence including the violence of urban displacement and labour exploitation. Life Beyond Waste is a welcome addition to the corpus of urban studies literature on Pakistan and complements the growing body of anthropological and sociological work on Lahore in particular. Butt’s study complements the work of Ammara Maqsood on middle class piety (2017) and Ayra Indrias Patras’s study on Christian working-class women in the city (2023) and brings us towards a more complex understanding of spatial and social relations in contemporary Lahore.

Of course, no ethnography can claim to cover the experiences of all people within a particular field given the depth of engagement required, and Life Beyond Waste is no exception. Butt is transparent about the limitations of his study (pp. 27-28), most of which spring from his own positionality as a Punjabi man. For this reason, he was not able to extensively engage with the experiences of women waste workers, although he attempts throughout the book to weave in the stories of women, particularly the relatives of his male interlocutors and a few female municipal workers. There is a consistent effort to highlight the fact that waste work (like all work) is gendered, with male family members often relying on women to assist in the process of sorting waste materials inside the home before they are re-sold to others in the commodity chain.

Butt was also unable to include the experiences of Pashtun workers, who form a significant portion of the waste economy, largely because of difficulties of access given the increasing amount of surveillance of Pashtun communities. This was an ethical choice, but it may leave the reader with the impression that waste work in Lahore is an exclusively Punjabi affair. More effort could have been made to describe how Pashtun workers fit within the wider waste economy of the city in a similar manner as was done for the women involved in this economy.

Overall, Life Beyond Waste is an important addition to urban studies not only in Pakistan but globally, highlighting how waste and the work surrounding it is central to the production and maintenance of the unevenness of contemporary urban life. Butt approaches his interlocutors with immense sensitivity and avoids falling into simplistic binaries of ‘victimhood’ versus ‘agency’ by arguing for a more complex understanding of waste workers’ struggles to build their lives within an ever-expanding and increasingly dehumanising urban context. In fact, one of the most valuable contributions of this book is its focus on waste work as central to the making of life, not only for those who are engaged directly in this work but for the life of the city itself.

References
Douglas, Mary (2002) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Maqsood, Ammara (2017) The New Pakistani Middle Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Patras, Ayra Indrias (2023) Swept Aside: A Story of Christian Sweepers in Lahore. Lahore: Folio Books.

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