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.

中文翻译：

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尼泊尔加德满都土地经纪人的价格和劳动力的模糊性

很少有数字比非正式的土地经纪人更能体现便利性。由于腐败、不透明和低效率而受到抨击，这些经纪人充其量被描绘成不同嵌入式市场之间的必要桥梁，最糟糕的是骗子从他们对关系和信息的垄断中获利。然而，很少有人关注经纪人如何影响市场的形成和价格的含义。在此，我对尼泊尔加德满都的土地经纪进行了分析。虽然家庭似乎对他们的土地价格几乎没有控制权，但我认为他们雇用非正式的土地经纪人允许他们对自己土地价值的个人估值影响其市场价格，有助于创造一个土地价格似乎“永远不会下降的市场” .串扰”——以及这种现象如何自相矛盾地取决于业主被排除在土地出售谈判之外，这是经纪人提供的一项服务。通过土地销售和经纪技术的民族志描述，我将经纪人视为形成一个不寻常市场的关键，这个市场允许土地商品化，同时消除供需的决定性影响。