Power Matters: Essays on Institutions, Politics and Society in India Book

List of Tables ix

Preface xi

Introduction: Why Power Matters 1

I Institutions and Power

1 'Borderlands of Economics': Institutions, Politics and Culture in the Explanation of Economic Change 13

Local Power and Agrarian Political Economy An Overview to Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 29

2 Making Out on Limited Resources 33

3 Why Poor People Stay Poor in Rural South India 75

4 Rural Inequality Matters: Constraints on Growth Linkages from Agriculture 103

5 Between Economism and Post-modernism: Reflections on Research on 'Agrarian Change' in India 135

6 'Widening the Radius of Trust': Ethnographic Explorations of Trust and Indian Business 169

II State and Society

7 For an Anthropology of the Modern Indian State 193

8 Do Political Regimes Matter?: Poverty Reduction and Regime Differences across India 212

9 Public Action and the Dialectics of Decentralization: Against the Myth of Social Capital as 'the Missing Link in Development' 240

10 'Politics is a Dirty River': But is there a 'New Politics' of Civil Society?: Perspectives from Global Cities of India and Latin America 256

Bibliography 275

Index 295