Political sociologists have typically studied the state as a self-enclosed institution hovering above civil society. In this formulation, the state is rendered as omniscient, gazing out over a passive civil society as if it were a naturalized landscape. But in this special issue, we think about how states "see" in relation to whom and what is seen, and how these subjects and collective actors become visible in the first place. We advocate a relational political ethnography that views the state and civil society as inextricably intertwined and mutually co-constitutive. People's experiences with the state shape their visions of that state, which in turn inform their strategic decisions and everyday engagements. And these decisions and engagements affect how the state views them. To put it differently, in this special issue, we explore the dialectical relationship between how the state "sees" and how it is "seen." They are inseparable processes. As we argue here, the very unity and coherence of the state apparatus turns not just upon its self-representation but equally upon how people make sense of these representations. How people understand this apparent state in the context of their everyday lives is a crucial source of its power and authority; it explains the reproduction of the state as a social institution. We conclude by introducing the seven empirical contributions to this issue, all of which practice relational political ethnography.

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Over the past decade, there has been a discernible rise in the number of wellness centers and fitness studios in urban cities in India. These centers are spatial manifestations of the rise in a particular type of ''self-care'' regimes and ''body projects'' in modern social imaginary prevalent in urban India, predominantly enabled by the rise of middle-class consumer culture. While the literature on fitness spaces and wellness clubs in Western contexts is instructive to a very large extent, the local particularities of consumption experiences in non-Western contexts require contextualized empirical research in order to better inform modern theories of consumption. This article is a study of a wellness center in the South Indian city of Chennai. Using ethnographic methods, I attempt to unpack the experience of consuming wellness in a space that ostensibly claims to remedy the ills of modern living while doing so in a culturally traditional and ''Indian'' manner. I show how the experiences of predominantly middle-class consumers here are dictated not by a sentimental attachment to tradition or locality, but by a vocabulary of speaking that primarily favors a language of consumer choice and rational decision-making. Whether or not that is the case, the way in which consumption of an ''Indian'' brand of wellness occurs demonstrates the stronghold of the language of consumer choice making the space at the wellness center a performative arena for self-identity formation to occur.

This article attempts to present an understanding of the current discussions regarding religious nationalism in a global framework in order to solicit two themes in the case of Hindu Nationalism and revivalism. One, the conflict of interest that arises between globalization as a "means" and as an "end"; two, the implications of network societies and the politics of marginalization. Globalization is looked at from two ends of a spectrum-as an end product versus as a process in itself. This distinction between theorizing globalization as an end or as a means to an end has been made by scholars such as Robertson and White (2007). However, its implications for religious nationalism have not been explored exhaustively. Furthermore, the analysis of Hindu nationalism and revivalism as a peripheral dynamic in the Western nations needs to be problematized in this regard.

In this article, I explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of migrant cab drivers in the Indian city of Hyderabad. Drawing on ethnographic data collected before and during the pandemic, I unpack how cab drivers who have migrated to the city in the hopes of a better life for their families make sense of waiting as an experience that constitutes and undoes the notion of upward mobility. I analyse how my interlocutors relate to time in differing ways through the day and how the pandemic has altered their expectations around the mundane activity of waiting. Building on scholarship that pushes us to apply a temporal lens to migration along with a spatial one, I argue that the uncertainties and precarities created by the pandemic have reconfigured migrants’ aspirations, their relationship to work, their imaginaries of the future and their articulation of hope and despair.