The Garbage Economy

Winner of the 2025 Joseph W. Elder Book Prize from the American Institute of Indian Studies.

In the race to become "world-class," the city of Delhi, India, turned to corporate partnerships and incineration technologies that promised to solve the city's garbage problem. However, these efforts exposed an uncomfortable reality: the city's drive toward modernization collided with an informal recycling economy that was more sustainable and deeply rooted. This persistence was not simply a policy failure; it was the outcome of relations between hundreds of thousands of oppressed-caste Dalit and Muslim workers and the dominant-caste, middle-class households they serve.

Based on over a decade of fieldwork, The Garbage Economy blends ethnographic precision with theoretical imagination. It traces the postcolonial remaking of Delhi's solid waste programs and follows transactions in garbage, recyclables, and money from neighborhood collection routes to recycling commodity chains. Dana Kornberg shows how laboring across the "untouchability line" not only perpetuates casteist exploitation but also maintains the city's only provision for recycling. Informal collectors transform stigmatized waste into recyclable commodities-identifying plastics, paper, and metal by feel and sound for recycling-simultaneously sustaining precarious livelihoods and reinforcing structural inequalities.

By introducing concepts such as stigma shifting, alchemization, practical legitimation, and symbolic debt in The Garbage Economy, Dana Kornberg reveals the pathways through which caste articulates with capital, regulating who is allowed to accumulate wealth and who is confined to survival at the margins. These processes-which Kornberg calls the "casteing" of capitalism-produce intersectional inequalities which continue to shape urban life.