Source — Jauregui, "Provisional Agency in India: Jugaad and Legitimation of Corruption" (2014) — abstract only
- Title: "Provisional Agency in India: Jugaad and Legitimation of Corruption"
- Author: Beatrice Jauregui
- Publication: American Ethnologist 41, no. 1 (2014): 76–91
- Date: 2014
- URL: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/amet.12061
- Accessed: 2026-09-03 — abstract only, via WebSearch synthesis; the article itself is paywalled and was not fetched or read
- Type: secondary (peer-reviewed anthropology journal article); the abstract's own framing is analytically neutral/dual (a "contronym," not a one-sided condemnation).
Extract
Not directly read — reported via WebSearch's synthesis of the published abstract, flagged per this project's standing rule on WebSearch-synthesized text; the wording below tracks closely with standard abstract phrasing and is treated as a reasonably reliable paraphrase, but has not been checked against the journal's own PDF.
Reported abstract content: jugaad is one of several euphemisms Indians use for corruption, referring to "goal-oriented improvisation, especially the use of informal social networks to advance one's interests." But the same word is also "conceived as necessary for 'getting by' and even as virtuous practice" — a contronym (a word carrying two opposed senses). Based on ethnographic fieldwork on police practices in Uttar Pradesh, Jauregui argues this dual character reflects a widespread value she terms "provisional agency": both the capability to provide a social good, and a temporary means of mobility oriented toward a better future.
This is this project's strongest evidence that jugaad's ambivalence (innovation vs. corruption) is not merely a popular-press impression but a specific, named finding of peer-reviewed social-science research — corroborating, with academic weight, the corruption association also made more casually by Birtchnell (2012) and the Wharton student authors (2013) (sources/theconversation-birtchnell-2012-jugaad.md; sources/wharton-jugaad-to-justice-2013.md).
Gaps
- The full article (ethnographic detail, specific police-practice examples, the "provisional agency" argument's full development) has not been read — only the abstract, and only via WebSearch synthesis rather than a direct read of even the abstract page. A session with access to the full text (e.g. via an institutional login this project does not have) could substantially deepen this citation.
- The article's title as reported by WebSearch during research ("Provisional Agency in Northern India...") and as given on the Wiley abstract-page search snippet ("Provisional agency in India...") differ in one word ("Northern"); this project has not resolved which is the article's actual published title.