Dealing with Dirt and the Disorder of Development
Managing Rubbish in Urban Pakistan
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7096566 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jo Beall (0000-0002-1898-3872, London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 81-97 |
| Publication date | 2006-02-07 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Oxford Development Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1360-0818 • E-ISSN: 1469-9966 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13600810500496087 |
| OpenAlex | W2006310108 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 18 |
| References cited | 22 |
This article unveils the different ‘thought worlds’ that inform urban development policy and the reality of urban service delivery in Faisalabad, Pakistan’s third largest city. Focusing on changing patterns of residential waste removal and based on ethnographic work among minority Christian street sweepers, the ‘little sub-worlds’ involved in domestic rubbish collection are explored, showing how these articulate with larger ‘thought worlds’ about dirt and disorder. The symbolic meanings of dirt across public and private spheres are examined alongside efforts by development practitioners and donors to impose generic policy solutions related to privatised delivery. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s insights about how ritual pollution or danger-beliefs serve generally to maintain social categories and hierarchies, the article nevertheless points to the historically contingent specificities of caste-like relations in urban Pakistan and how these have been constructed. It shows how under increasing competition for scarce jobs, entitlements associated with hereditary status-based occupations are once more appealed to and reconstructed by these vulnerable waste workers, shaping in the process urban service delivery and the relations that underpin it. The disjuncture born of diverse logics about dirt and disorder reveal an institutional multiplicity and messy social reality that sits uneasily with development as an ordering and unidirectional process
Caste · Dirt · Economic growth · Economics · Ethnography · Geography · Political science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Law · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Water Governance and Infrastructure
Consanguinity, Genetics and Definitions of Kinship in the Uk Pakistani Population
Garbage Citizenship
Political (in)visibility and governance disconnects
Discriminated in Society and Marginalized in Media
Not Just Recycling the Crisis
Women’s environmental health activism around waste and plastic pollution in the coastal wetlands of Yucatán
Gendered community-based waste management and the feminization of environmental responsibility in Greater Jakarta, Indonesia
Women's ecological oral histories of recycling and development in coastal Yucatán
Beyond the Abject
Labor Laid Waste
From Waste to Resource
Geographies of waste
Challenging conceptions of young people as urban blight
Disorderly Dakar
Chronicity and Covid-19
Waste intimacies
Home Sweet Messy Home
Caste System and Resistance
Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age
Homo hierarchicus
Castes of Mind
Thoughts on Poverty from a South Asian Rubbish Dump
The historical lineages of poverty and exclusion in Pakistan
Marks of Capital
Jobs and jobbery
Purity and Danger
Native Dirt/Imperial Ordure
Open space/public place
How institutions think
Social Anthropology of Work
Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon and North-West Pakistan
Is a Theory of Caste Still Possible
Family Status Production
Class and Power in a Punjabi Village
| Unique citing works | 18 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,38 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2026 (14) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 16 |