Relational Infrastructures of Rural Life: A Relational Ethnography of Weekly Haats in Tribal Koraput, Odisha

Abstract

Weekly rural markets (haats) are commonly understood as spaces of exchange, livelihood generation, and social interaction. While these functions are well documented, existing scholarship often examines them as separate domains, treating the market as a bounded institution within which economic, social, and cultural activities occur. This paper argues instead that the weekly market is better understood as a relational configuration through which these processes are continuously constituted. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between November 2023 and December 2025 in the weekly markets of Guneipoda (Lamtaput) and Onkadelli in Koraput district, Odisha, the study is based on twenty-six market visits, approximately two months of participant observation, 120 semi-structured interviews, and detailed ethnographic fieldnotes. Rather than analysing producers, traders, commodities, or institutions as discrete units, the paper reconstructs the relational configurations through which subsistence production, intermediary trade, mobility, information circulation, and cultural practices become interconnected during recurring market encounters. The findings demonstrate that the haat operates simultaneously as a mechanism of commodity circulation, a site of social reproduction, a point of institutional encounter, and a space where cultural identities are negotiated. These functions do not exist independently; they emerge through repeated interactions linking tribal households, intermediary traders, state agencies, transport networks, and regional commodity chains. By operationalising methodological relationalism through relational ethnography, the paper contributes to sociological debates on informal markets, embedded economies, and rural transformation by demonstrating that the significance of weekly markets lies less in their individual functions than in the relational processes through which rural social life is continually organised.