“No One is Poor in Himachal”: Cultivating Stateless Agency in an Indian Village Assembly

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.

Bureaucratizing like a girl: Objectivity and the reinforcement of patriarchy at an Israeli government committee

“…The template leaves little room for textual references where staffers could intuit their positions (Hull, 2012). Thirdly, even in those few places within the template where they could do so, namely study summaries, staffers were expected to deploy a specific vocabulary of statistical terms such as “significance” ( Muvhakut ) and “statistical power” ( Otzma statistit ), which, in line with hegemonic scientific discourse, staffers saw as value‐free (Carlan, 2021; Porter, 1995).…”