Wave Theory: Cash, Crowds, and Caste in Indian Elections

This talk develops an ethnography of emergent “waves” in the run-up to elections in rural India to ask questions about the signs people read suggesting that political change is happening in one direction as opposed to another, and about how voters align themselves to these signs as they are circulated across media forms.  By paying attention to how people assess chances across factors ranging from cash-flow, crowd behavior, and caste calculations, on to professional analyses of polling data, this approach conceptualizes the ambient and layered ecologies of information that inform position-taking where everyday speculation about political fortunes is situated alongside formalized methods of analysis, calculation, and prediction.  Wave theory can also shed light on parallels between ethnographic and subaltern psephological epistemologies, insofar as they both raise the problem of scale in their quest to explain the experiential dimensions of a phenomenon as massive as national elections in India.