‘Beware of dalals’: a moral world of health market brokerage in Bangladesh

Abstract

AbstractAnthropological enquiry into brokers and brokerage practice provides a prime entry point for making sense of social change. This article tends to the ways in which the trope of the broker and the everyday practice of those identified as enacting brokerage act as linchpins in broader moral grappling during a period of rapid social change. It draws from the ethnographic context of brokerage discursively constituted and enacted within maternal health markets in Bangladesh, focusing on the trope and actual practice of those identified as morally compromised dalals: brokers bringing women and families from public to private health institutions. It argues that the trope of the dalal operates as a metaphor for immorality ascribed to morally ambiguous spaces of the private health sector, a way for people to contend with a moral discomfort integral to applying market logics to health services enacted largely outside the jurisdiction of formal regulatory mechanisms. The practice of those identified as embodying dalals, in contrast, while flourishing in these conditions, is rooted in economic precarity, primarily of young men with limited power waiting for better opportunities, who negotiate and balance moral and economic imperatives in their line of work.