The ambiguity of price and the labor of land brokers in Kathmandu, Nepal

Abstract

Few figures are more at odds with convenience than the informal land broker. Lambasted for corruption, opacity, and inefficiency, at best such brokers are portrayed as necessary bridges between different embedded markets, at worst as crooks profiting from their monopolizing of relationships and information. Yet, little attention is given to how brokers can affect the formation of markets and the meaning of price. Herein I offer an analysis of land brokerage in Kathmandu, Nepal. Though families have seemingly little control over the price of their land, I argue that their employing of informal land brokers allows their personal valuations of their own land's worth to influence its market price, helping to create a market where land prices seemingly “never go down.” I explore the ways different potential framings of land value illuminate each other—what I call “crosstalk”—and how this phenomenon paradoxically depends on owners being bracketed out of the negotiation over their land's sale, a service that brokers provide. Through ethnographic accounts of land sales and brokerage techniques, I present brokers as key to the formation of an unusual market, one that allows for the commodification of land while eliding the determinative effects of supply and demand.