Introduction: Provisional relations, indeterminate conditions: Non-sociological sociality in South Asia

In the introduction to this special section, we present six ethnographic articles that explore the sites and forms of ‘non-sociological sociality’ in South Asia. Set in urban spaces where the familiar vectors of relations, such as ethnicity, class, gender or age, may be attenuated, the articles examine how social and political entanglement is suffused with ambiguity, indeterminacy, provisionality and contingency. In these sites, opaque conditions, open-ended play, double meanings and interpretive scrutiny abound. Spaces such as the racecourse, the bazaar, the university campus or the nocturnal street suggest undetermined conditions and fleeting collaborations which have a wider bearing on cross-cutting forms of sociality in South Asia.