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This ethnographic article focuses on interactions between poor Muslim women, various intermediaries/brokers, and the Indian state. The article illustrates the complexities of claim-making and the forms of subjugation/marginalisation Muslim women experience when attempting to access resources, documents or paperwork. Contrary, however, to many representations of Muslim women's engagements with the state, we also draw out agentive aspects as women hustle and negotiate to make claims and assert citizenship rights. Outcomes are variegated but also incorporate some women in brokerage roles, challenging assumptions regarding state/people mediation in India which foregrounds male brokers. The empirical detail is situated in a theoretical context incorporating gendered distinctions between shifting imaginaries of 'nation' and lived experiences of the 'everyday state'. In a context where 'nation' has been evoked and articulated as a feminine form – through evocations of mata (mother) – we show how shifts towards a masculine imaginary, symbolised within Hindu-nationalist discourses, impacts Muslim women's subjective experiences. We also illustrate that, whilst gendered imaginaries of 'the nation' are shifting, the 'everyday state' has long been experienced as a masculinised formation. Here we show how embodied involvements with the everyday state were constituted through gendered bureaucratic histories, spatial configurations, urban cosmologies and broader ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many contexts there are a range of individuals and organisations offering healthcare services that differ widely in cost, quality and outcomes. This complexity is exacerbated by processes of healthcare commercialisation. Yet reliable information on healthcare provision is often limited, and progress to and through the healthcare system may depend on knowledge drawn from prior experiences, social networks and the providers themselves. It is in these contexts that healthcare brokerage emerges and third-party actors facilitate access to healthcare. This article presents a novel framework for studying brokerage of access to healthcare, and empirical evidence on healthcare brokerage in urban slums in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. The framework comprises six areas of interest that have been derived from sociological and political science literature on brokerage. A framework approach was used to group observational and interview data into six framework charts (one for each area of interest) to facilitate close thematic analysis. A cadre of women in Lucknow's urban slums performed healthcare brokerage by encouraging use of particular healthcare services, organising travel, and mediating communications and fee negotiations with providers. The women emphasised their personal role in facilitating access to care and encouraged dependency on their services by withholding information from users. They received commission payments from healthcare programmes, and sometimes from users and hospitals as well, but were blamed for issues beyond their control. Disruption to their ability to facilitate low-cost healthcare meant some women lost their positions as brokers, while others adapted by leveraging old and new relationships with hospital managers. Brokerage analysis reveals how people capitalise on the complexity of healthcare systems by positioning themselves as intermediaries. Commercialised healthcare systems offer a fertile environment for such behaviours, which can undermine attainment of healthcare entitlements and exacerbate inequities in healthcare access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT For more than 150 years, most tea grown on plantations in northeast India has been sold in open-outcry auctions in Kolkata. In this essay, I describe how, in 2009, the Tea Board of India, the government regulator of the tea trade, began to convert auctioning from a face-to-face outcry process to a face-to-computer digital one. The Tea Board hoped that with the implementation of digital technologies, trade would soon revolve around the buying and selling of futures contracts, not individual lots of tea. Despite these efforts, the tea industry has thus far resisted all attempts at financialization. That so prominent a commodity as tea has yet to be financialized provides a unique opportunity to examine the how of financialization-the governmental and technical steps that precede futures and other kinds of derivatives markets. Futures markets rely on a standardized notion of price and of the material things being priced. The story of Indian tea's resistance to financialization shows how such standardization requires not just a disentangling of commodities at the level of productive infrastructure (that is, the separation of individual trader and thing being traded) but also a reworking of the communicative infrastructure of trading. In this essay, I analyze this reworking by examining the effort to reform how tea is priced at auction. Specifically, I describe a transition in tea valuation from socially embedded price stories to standardized price scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Based on a study of how rural land brokers mediate the arrival of a Special Economic Zone in rural Rajasthan, this paper argues that theories of collective social capital cannot explain how networks, norms, and trust interact in a process of economic change. It then reconstructs Bourdieu’s distinct theory of individual social capital by showing how better-connected farmers are able to broker land and capture profits at the expense of fellow villagers, undermining trust, norms, and collective action. It argues that social capital is most plausibly seen as an aspect of social inequality that hinders inclusive development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out with transparency activists in Delhi between 2006 and 2007, this article explores their attempts to help Delhi's poor engage with the state as active citizens claiming their rights to welfare. Drawing on Lawrence Cohen's recent writing on ethical publicity I argue that the work of transparency activists is directed at producing an 'ethical scene' in which their poor clients are encouraged to understand themselves as potentially empowered citizens of a nation wounded by corruption and bad governance. However, this ethical scene is partly framed by exclusionary middle-class discourses about corruption, dirty politics, and brokerage that problematize the need for the urban poor to negotiate their existence in the city through informal mediated connections to political and bureaucratic power. The same mediated connections between 'political society' and the local state which transparency and accountability activists work to expose and reform. Furthermore, my ethnography shows how the process of promoting and implementing transparency mechanisms in the social and political context of urban India produces new relationships of brokerage between activists and those who seek their assistance as expert mediators with the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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