SYNOPSIS

How does the marketplace become a volatile site of interaction between political violence and everyday life? Drawing on my fieldwork with traders in Indian-administered Kashmir, I examine how goods circulate amid permanent crisis and what forms of political critique are developed in spaces of public sociality and exchange. Specifically, I focus on trust-based informal credit that remained the basis for capital and commodity circulation in my fieldsite despite being curtailed by militarization and mistrust. I show how traders maintained economic relations by bending the orthodox rules of forecast that are commonly drawn upon to determine credit transactions. Instead, the open temporal dynamic between trust and credit emerged as a site for traders to transform commercial and political relations in the flux of war and uncertain futures and forge collectivities that, however tenuous, resist the communalized narratives that frame the Kashmir conflict.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Aditi Saraf is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University. Her current book project, tentatively titled Frontier Signatures investigates the relationship between commerce and sovereignty in the Kashmir region. Combining ethnographic and archival work, her research interests revolve around questions of political economy, frontiers and mobility, militarization and place-making practices. Her academic writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Ethnologist, Economic and Political Weekly and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology.

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