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In this article I conceptualize a conflict over the Narmada damming project in central India by highlighting particular spatial fields and larger trajectories of political interaction. The Narmada project's maintenance and destabilization is evinced in a range of processes, including conflict over afforestation in tribal villages, protest narratives over resettlement in regional centres, and transnational lobbying of donor agencies. The interpenetration of social practices by different scales, and the mobility of discourses are emphasized. Further, I examine how organizational and social decisions such as implementing a rehabilitation programme, accepting state compensation and participating in public protest point to the contingent nature of power, revealing both complicity and disarticulation between involved parties. Descriptive points and commentary focus on the Indian riparian states implementing the project; the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement); and affected adivasi (tribal) communities in the Narmada Valley.In this article I depart from a concern with how social processes and the power relations sustaining them are manifested through local agency, national interlocutors and international discourses. How can we conceptualize contemporary social relations marked by forces such as nation-states, transnational corporations and social movements, where conflict must both be situated within particular temporal and spatial fields and larger trajectories of social and political interaction? This is explored by examining how 'development', the Narmada damming project in central India, is implemented and opposed. Descriptive points and commentary focus on three constituents in the Narmada conflict. First, I highlight the riparian states implementing the project, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. Second, I discuss a social movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement; hereafter NBA or the Andolan) and affiliated activist allies. Finally, I examine the effects of displacement and land encroachment on adivasi (tribal) communities in the Narmada Valley.My argument is structured through two lines of enquiry. First, the Narmada project is situated within multiple geographical and social scales, whereby it is manifested and opposed. The Narmada project's maintenance and destabilization is evinced in a range of processes, including conflict over compensatory afforestation in villages, protest narratives over resettlement and corruption in regional towns, and

When I began fieldwork in Old Delhi, I was frequently disoriented. A number of visitor's guides to the area had been published, describing, for example, the Meena Bazaar. They detailed historical monuments in the vicinity, but were unhelpful in explaining much else. Though this part of Delhi was many years old, its present uses differed markedly from those at its genesis. The Meena Bazaar's seventeenth-century material surroundings, for example, were obscured by centuries of demolition and improvisation.Moreover, it was not the kind of place that easily lent itself to mapping. Like many Delhi residents, I frequently consulted a map book produced by the Eicher company, which broke down the city into manageable parts. But in its pages covering the old city, the gaze from above -the promise of clean lines and ordered spaces -was betrayed by the street, where everything blurred. Still I didn't lose hope: guidebooks and maps are, after all, for tourists and residents.Surely, trained in anthropology and armed with an inventory of native culture, I could do better. Yet here I confronted another hurdle. Anthropologists of India, whether based in rural villages or urban settings, tend to focus on a particular community. But Delhi's old city, exemplified by a space like the Meena Bazaar, was not defined by a caste, class or religious group. It was clearly a plural space, lacking a distilled set of rituals, or an all-encompassing culture.I started trying to make sense of the area, as proper scholars do, by delineating the bazaar's physical boundaries and official status. On its eastern end, bordering a major road, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Marg, street hawkers sold counterfeit Dolce and

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This article is a study of Delhi's monkey-catchers, municipal contractors who trap and relocate simians. I examine their perspectives, as well as those of planners and residents. Parallel but competing dispositions vis-à-vis monkeys -fascination and repulsion, piousness and annoyance -are detailed. In so doing, the article addresses the following themes: purification and displacement, the neighbour and stranger, multi-species cohabitation, planning and modernization, and the circulation of gift and sin. Three interwoven arguments bear on studies of modernity, urban governance, and post-humanism. First, Indian cities are not becoming irreversibly bourgeois and sanitized; humans engage in varied ways with monkeys and are complicit in their presence, by ritually gifting food. The logic of the gift vies with the desire to cleanse; a supernatural current animates the modernist city. Second, studies of bureaucratic power often presume coherence and efficiency. In contrast, I illustrate official ambivalence to cleansing, as well as structural constraints and makeshift arrangements that conspire against the master plan. Third, I question post-humanist and multi-species theories that seek to transcend Western ontology. The monkey-catchers' porous taxonomy for human-animal differences affirms human primacy as much as it dissolves dichotomies.