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'Making a River of Gold: Publicity, Friendship and Public-Private Partnerships on the Hooghly'
Laura Bear
1700 hrs
28 November 2012
Small Committee Room, King’s College London, Strand campus, Ground floor
Unlike patronage or corruption, the place of friendship in bureaucratic practice has been little explored. This reflects a wider 'romance of friendship' within capitalism. This suggests that friendship is a zone of authentic, individual relations outside the market or that it supports trust and the generation of prosperity through market exchange. This paper uses an ethnography of bureaucrats, entrepreneurs and informal labour on the Hooghly river to show how friednships generate public-private partnerships during liberalisation in India. As the public good is redefined as decentralized speculative planning that creates propserity through collaborations with the privatre sector both officials and businessmen turn to the pursuit of jogajog kora. This is the creation of useful friednships that allow individuals to accumulate power around them. This influence is conceived of as a limitless mathematical process of adding and adding again in a mixture of idioms of accountancy and affect.
On the Hooghly these relationships make the state and market 'work' but they are founded on and generate economic and political exclusions. In addition they create mutuality between individuals, but are forged through intimidation and the invocation of higher powers. They are also surrounded by the unpredictable, arbitrary threat of withdrawal as they are not permanent ties. There are also limits to whom one extends friendship. A hierarchical distinction is created between those who are less equal to whom sympathy and patronage rather than friendship is offered. Most significantly, these relations are built with and sustain secrets therefore they generate opacity in public life. This paper uses these practices to reflect on the wide and growing significance of a parallel world of secrets, complicity and publicity to the bureaucracies of state capitalism in India aned elsewhere. It also reflects on the new forms of financing of public infrastructure in India, the forms of entrepreneurial society (as opposed to political society) these produce and their effects on waterscapes.
Laura Bear is in the Anthropology Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of The Jadu House: Intimate Histories of Anglo-India (2000); Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy and the Intimate Historical Self (2007) and a book currently under review, Navigating Austerity: State Debt Policy and Popular Economies on a South Asian River. She is also the editor of a forthcoming JRAI special issue Conflict, Douth and Mediation: An Anthropology of Modern Time (2014).
RSVP: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Convenor: Kriti Kapila
Dr Kriti Kapila
Lecturer in Anthropology and Law
King's India Institute
King's College London
Strand, London WC2R 2LS
Ph: +44 207 848 7053
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