This article examines the bedrock of rural governance in India—the village assembly, or gram sabha—and the deliberative process whereby citizens are designated as “below the poverty line” (BPL). I examine one gram sabha in Himachal Pradesh wherein BPL status was eradicated altogether, leaving hundreds of people ineligible for a vast array of state aid programs. I argue that this outcome relied on an interactional achievement whereby state actors (bureaucrats and elected representatives) rendered village residents into a collectivized agent while erasing their own role and responsibility from the proceedings. These semiotic processes of collectivization and erasure underlie what I call “stateless agency.” I trace three linguistic resources that cultivate stateless agency: (i) causative verbs that distribute agency across multiple grammatically encoded participant roles; (ii) code switches from the local language, Kangri, into a register of English-infused Hindi that invokes what I call the “bureaucratic voice”; and (iii) metapragmatic statements that explicitly attribute agency to other speaker(s). This investigation builds on studies of grammar and political agency (Duranti 1990; 1994) and bureaucratic agency (Hull 2003; 2012) by demonstrating how linguistic resources mediate the paradoxical erasure of state actors from bureaucratic and democratic practice, with often drastic consequences for rural livelihoods.

中文翻译：

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“喜马偕尔没有人是穷人”：在印度乡村议会中培养无国籍机构

本文考察了印度农村治理的基石——村民大会或gram sabha——以及公民被指定为“贫困线以下”（BPL）的审议过程。我检查一克 sabha在喜马偕尔邦，BPL 地位被完全根除，使数百人没有资格参加大量的国家援助计划。我认为，这一结果依赖于一种互动成就，即国家行为者（官僚和民选代表）将村民变成集体化的代理人，同时从程序中消除他们自己的角色和责任。这些集体化和擦除的符号学过程是我所谓的“无国籍机构”的基础。我追踪了培养无状态能动性的三种语言资源：(i) 在多个语法编码的参与者角色之间分配能动性的因果动词；(ii) 代码从当地语言 Kangri 切换到融合了英语的印地语语域，它调用了我所说的“官僚声音”；(iii) 元语用陈述，明确将代理权归于其他说话者。这项调查建立在对语法和政治能动性（Duranti 1990; 1994）和官僚能动性（Hull 2003; 2012）的研究的基础上，通过展示语言资源如何调解国家行为者从官僚和民主实践中自相矛盾的消除，这往往对农村生计产生严重后果.