Book Review: Life Beyond Waste
Book review of Life Beyond Waste: Work and Infrastructure in Urban Pakistan, by Waqas H. Butt (2023)
Life Beyond Waste: Work and Infrastructure in Urban Pakistan, by Waqas H. Butt (2023). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
In Life Beyond Waste, Waqas Butt recounts an incident in which he attempts to help Ghulam Ali, an informal waste worker, lift a bundle of waste—wrapped in a soiled cloth—onto his head. Butt offers this assistance after a foreman at the collection site refuses to assist. As he helps, the bundle falls, covering his face, clothes, and hands in dust and debris. Later, Butt describes his sense of disgust and anxiety as he struggles to rid himself of the waste’s polluting and seemingly harmful traces (160–161). While this account is both reflexive and honest, it highlights the broader social anxieties and antagonisms surrounding caste, waste, and labor in urban Pakistan—central themes in this rich historical and ethnographic study.
Life Beyond Waste is a compelling ethnographic account of low- and non-caste waste workers, particularly Christian minorities, in contemporary Lahore. Through life histories and fieldwork, the book explores how waste work—the central anthropological theme—is deeply intertwined with the reproduction of life in urban Pakistan. Waste work, as Butt argues, is reproductive precisely because it weaves caste-based relations into the bureaucratic, technical, and legal systems of waste management. In this way, waste work “constitutes an infrastructure aimed at reproducing forms of life in Lahore and beyond that have been organized along the lines of caste, class, and religion” (7).
The introduction traces the transformation of caste-based relations in Punjab, as this region shifted from an agrarian economy, a process that required colonial interventions to manage Lahore’s urbanization in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (10–11). Here, Butt also examines the complex and often contentious sociopolitical relationship between Pakistan’s Muslim nationalism and its minority populations, particularly Christians, as well as Islam’s connection to caste (12–13). Building on this foundation, the introduction then lays the ground for the book’s key contribution on reproduction; Butt contends that the mobilization of low- and non-caste groups in urban waste management was, and remains, instrumental in perpetuating historical caste-based inequalities. As such, waste work plays a crucial role in reproducing what the author calls “forms of life” (23)—the social, material, and kin-based relations within, and among, Pakistan’s low- and non-caste groups.
Chapter 1, “An Order of Urban Life,” is based primarily on historical and archival sources and asks “how did caste become embedded into the very order of urban life?” (36). This chapter is shaped by the concept of the “public,” which unfolds through various regimes of governance, politics, and labor. Here, Butt argues that the bureaucratic state itself was built upon caste-based relations (36–42); this was accomplished by confining custom to the private sphere, while placing waste work into the public domain under contractual arrangements—yet still sustaining its reliance on caste-based relations (41). Butt then outlines how the management of disease and sewage were important in both discourses on sanitation and urban control, through the regulation of wage work and the disciplining of labor to make waste disposal “more regular and predictable” (53). By centering the “public” in his analysis, Butt reveals how “caste-based relations are subtly incorporated into the fabric of urban life” (56) and subsequently reproduced “through the techno-legal apparatus of the bureaucratic state” (57).
Chapter 2, “The Appearance of Things,” offers ethnographic portraits of key figures, such as the daroghah (sanitary supervisor), while examining the activities, relationships, and practices that are “constitutive of waste infrastructures in contemporary Pakistan” (61). Beyond surveying the material and labor relations of waste work, the chapter also explores how these practices are “embedded within networks of patronage” and tied to citizen claims for “a public good or service like solid waste management” (63). One of the chapter’s most compelling aspects is Butt’s use of “management” as a heuristic to analyze how human labor, the bureaucratic state, and techno-infrastructures are mutually entangled—both in the aggregation and dispersal of waste (70). The ethnographic illustrations in this chapter detail how waste work is “accessed”—that is, made available to low- and non-caste groups—within Lahore’s solid-waste management infrastructures. Such forms of accessing waste work include secure forms of municipal employment, as well as precarious and informal work (71–76). However, the lines between the two are often blurred and contested; waste workers establish relationships with the owners of junkyards, which operate outside bureaucratic management, yet also remain subject to the disciplinary power of the daroghah and representatives of political parties and residential and merchant associations (78). Overall, this chapter shows how practices of managerialism, including the pivotal role of the daroghah, has “created a division between those working with waste materials and those managing them as solid waste” (82).
Chapter 3, “Surplus and Excess,” presents some of the most effective ethnographic and theoretical arguments in Life Beyond Waste. This chapter focuses on kabarian (junkyard owners) and bioparian (traders), who serve as crucial nodes in the movement of waste—understood as material objects—through urban Pakistan; in addition to facilitating this flow, they also generate value by “appropriating forms of life that are not necessarily organized for accumulation” (90; emphasis in original). By analyzing the kabarian, Butt illustrates how waste objects are materially transformed through sorting and transportation, processes that rely on underpaid, unpaid, and exploited forms of labor—which are often kin-based and gendered. These labor relations form the basis of capital accumulation, facilitated through various economic exchanges—such as remuneration, credit, debt, and arbitrage—between kabarian and bioparian. Butt provides vivid ethnographic details of these economic dynamics; for instance, participants describe the notion of “maintaining relations” (99) when addressing contentious exchanges or risks of fraud. Such unequal exchanges also manifest themselves in how “physical and mental labor are mobilized” to assess the value of waste objects, as seen in the careful examination of materials such as copper (102). By critically weighing the idea of informality, this chapter underscores how economic relations surrounding waste work are fundamentally unequal, even as they sustain connections between uneven lives (111).
Chapter 4, “The Unevenness of Intimacy,” examines the social relationships that are mediated by waste materials and work, particularly as these are negotiated across lines of caste, class, and religion (114). In this chapter, Butt uses “waste intimacies” to further contextualize waste work within the scholarship on caste, purity, and pollution (115). In doing so, the chapter productively explores how waste intimacies are equally about “distancing and antagonism” and “proximity and interdependence” (116). The remainder of the chapter explores the affective and material dimensions of waste work, including the reproduction of life in Lahore’s jhuggian (informal homes) through kinship and domestic labor (129). It also examines how waste workers navigate access to—and exclusion from—the intimacies of upper-caste households, revealing how “waste work is crucial in reproducing spatial and material relations that suture together Lahore’s unevenly urbanizing landscape” (126–127).
Chapter 5, “The Possibility of Reproduction,” examines the reproduction of intergenerational and collective life, which the author categorizes into three distinct efforts: “settling on land, building and maintaining a home, and exhausting the self through work” (145). This chapter presents an intergenerational portrayal of informal waste workers, such as Allah Ditta and Isaak Babar, who were introduced previously. Butt traces their journeys to and work in Lahore over the decades. The author’s sensitive depictions of these protagonists highlight the hardships faced by informal workers, for whom “divisions between work and life are not easily distinguishable” (158). The chapter then presents deeply moving accounts of the exhausting and grueling labor that waste workers must undertake, including the physical and mental ailments that they suffer. It also highlights moments of joy and pleasure, particularly for women, that mobility can offer (165–166). By focusing on the dual processes of reproduction and exhaustion, the chapter firmly situates historical caste identities within contemporary scholarship on waste and labor (167).
Life Beyond Waste makes an important contribution to the anthropology of work; indeed, readers of Exertions will find this book to be an excellent ethnography of labor, as Butt himself frames his arguments within a labor-centered approach (21). This focus on labor is perhaps most clearly illustrated in the book’s central focus on reproduction—a theoretical lens drawn from transnational Marxist feminists (22). This book will also be of particular interest to scholars researching caste and religion in South Asia, especially Islam and Christianity, as well as those studying human-nonhuman and socio-material relations. Additionally, Butt’s work addresses key theoretical and analytical gaps in fields such as material and culture studies, discard studies, and waste studies. Life Beyond Waste persuasively demonstrates how both historical and contemporary waste regimes—the collection and processing of urban waste and their attendant social relations—are tied to (post-)colonial governance and capitalist consumption and are inseparable from the structure of caste society in South Asia.
Life Beyond Waste is a well-written and -structured book, one I am confident that readers will find instructive. Butt skillfully develops and refines his central argument—that waste work moves fluidly between historical and intimate scales. However, one limitation of the book is its lack of focus on gender relations—a limitation that Butt acknowledges at the outset due to the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting cross-gender fieldwork in Lahore. While this clarification is helpful, I believe that the book could have further engaged with gender and reproduction by exploring masculinity and masculine norms. This would underscore how the devaluation of socially reproductive labor, especially in its feminized and caste-based forms, is central to both capitalist accumulation and waste disposal. Despite this limitation, Life Beyond Waste opens doors for future scholarship on labor, work, and reproduction. As such, the book offers valuable insights for anthropologists interested in waste, caste, and the maintenance of vital urban infrastructures.
