"No One is Poor in Himachal": Cultivating Stateless Agency in an Indian Village Assembly. (15th April 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Carlan, Hannah
• Is Part Of: Journal of linguistic anthropology. Volume 31:Number 1(2021)
• Page Start: 64
• Page End: 96
• Publication Date: 2021-04-15
• Subjects: agency -- bureaucracy -- deliberative democracy -- collectivization -- erasure; Anthropological linguistics -- Periodicals; 306.44089
• DOI: 10.1111/jola.12299
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1055-1360

Abstract

Abstract : This article examines the bedrock of rural governance in India—the village assembly, or gram sabha —and the deliberative process whereby citizens are designated as "below the poverty line" (BPL). I examine one gram sabha in Himachal Pradesh wherein BPL status was eradicated altogether, leaving hundreds of people ineligible for a vast array of state aid programs. I argue that this outcome relied on an interactional achievement whereby state actors (bureaucrats and elected representatives) rendered village residents into a collectivized agent while erasing their own role and responsibility from the proceedings. These semiotic processes of collectivization and erasure underlie what I call "stateless agency." I trace three linguistic resources that cultivate stateless agency: (i) causative verbs that distribute agency across multiple grammatically encoded participant roles; (ii) code switches from the local language, Kangri, into a register of English‐infused Hindi that invokes what I call the "bureaucratic voice"; and (iii) metapragmatic statements that explicitly attribute agency to other speaker(s). This investigation builds on studies of grammar and political agency (Duranti 1990; 1994) and bureaucratic agency (Hull 2003; 2012) by demonstrating how linguistic resources mediate the paradoxical erasure of state actors from bureaucratic and democratic practice, with often drastic consequences for rural livelihoods.