Llerena Guiu Searle
Biographic Data
| ID | 170789 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Llerena Guiu Searle |
| GIVEN NAMES | Llerena Guiu |
| FAMILY NAME | Searle |
| SIGNATURE | SEARLE L G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Rochester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3863-7835 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 164 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Provincializing the “Real‐Estate Turn”
Not Just Roads
What happens when infrastructures embody a constant state of incompletion? What happens when they are initiated for political allegiance rather than actual functioning? How do people engage with th
Market Stance
This article advances a linguistic anthropological understanding of economic performativity by investigating how people uphold face when it is tied up in business performance. Analyzing interviews with the owners of Indian real estate firms, I demonstrate that under troubled market conditions, market indicators become indexical signs that can threaten a real-estate professional's face, necessitating interactional repositioning vis-à-vis market de…
The contradictions of mediation
This paper uses a case study of an Indian real estate investment fund to understand the financialization of urban production. It argues that chains of intermediaries transform fixed, illiquid parcels of land into financial assets open to mobile capital. By investigating how such chains are made, it highlights the agency of the actors who build them. Yet, an examination of the fund's failure in the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis demonstrates …
Conclusion
This chapter describes Gurgaon and Indian real estate markets in 2014, six years after the research for the book was completed. Despite ongoing construction, the author did not find the real estate market that many had envisioned in 2006. In part because of the global financial crisis that began in 2008, and in part because of the contradictions inherent in the structure of the chains of intermediaries through which Indian real estate was being f…
Routes of Accumulation
The liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s changed the structure of the real estate industry: it ushered in new roles for private-sector elites and spurred the growth of real estate-related markets such as mortgage financing and media, which precipitated the real estate boom that transformed Gurgaon and other Indian cities. Economic liberalization also opened Indian real estate to foreign direct investment, making foreign investors imp…
Constructing Consumer India
Investors and developers argued that a certain kind of person – one who, unlike the majority of Indians, earns well, lives in a nuclear family, and has a spouse who works – guaranteed future demand for real estate and thus price appreciation. The resulting “end-user” or “genuine resident” eerily resembles a generic globally elite consumer. This chapter traces the origins of this middle class “genuine consumer” from social science surveys to consu…
Quality Projects II
Developers’ Quest for Credibility and Capital
Developers’ value projects coincided with and conflicted with the goal of “transparency.” In response to the demands of foreign financiers and Indian consumers, Indian real estate developers have attempted to transform themselves into world-class, global professionals. Thus transparency is a figure of personhood, a stereotypic “kind” of person that one can perform semiotically. In their profitable new role as intermediaries to global capital, how…
The India Story
Quality Projects I
This chapter follows one international fund’s attempts to profit from the difference between Indian and international fields of real estate practice through building “quality” buildings. Quality here is understood as a semiotic register of building appropriate to an elite foreign audience. However, the fund (EuroFund) faced a profusion of other claims to “quality” and challenges to the value of its employees’ expertise. The chapter uses EuroFund’…
Betting on the Future
This chapter argues that the “India story” is a form of speculative knowledge that enables spectacular accumulation such that industry forecasts guide the production of landscapes designed for particular futures. Rather than use land market signals to decide what to build, as Marxist theory suggests, developers and investors use forms of speculative knowledge to guide their decisions. These industry predictions rely on a logic of comparison that …
Landscapes of Accumulation
Conflict and Commensuration
Newly constructed high-rise housing and malls, soaring land prices and violent confrontations over land testify to the massive urban transformations underway inIndia today. Having secured an expanded role in urban development from the state, the private sector helps to shape urban restructuring; however, few scholars have studied private real estate development inIndia or revealed the factions that underlie an analytically unitary 'private sector…
Constructing prestige and elaborating the 'professional
This article examines the production of the internationally familiar landscapes of gated high-rise housing, malls and information technology campuses that have been constructed in the National Capital Region, India since the liberalisation of the economy in the early 1990s. It argues that Indian real estate developers have elaborated on one figure of personhood-the upwardly-mobile, high-earning, internationally-oriented 'professional'-as part of …
Introduction
Through a discussion of the articles of this issue, this introduction explores the ways in which the social landscape of post-liberalisation India can be seen through the question of value. We are particularly interested in elucidating how heterogeneous kinds of value-be they economic, ritual, aesthetic, ethical or otherwise-have come to be articulated to and thus constitutive of various forms of cultural practice in contemporary India. We sugges…
Landscapes of Accumulation
The contradictions of mediation
This paper uses a case study of an Indian real estate investment fund to understand the financialization of urban production. It argues that chains of intermediaries transform fixed, illiquid parcels of land into financial assets open to mobile capital. By investigating how such chains are made, it highlights the agency of the actors who build them. Yet, an examination of the fund's failure in the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis demonstrates …
Conflict and Commensuration
Newly constructed high-rise housing and malls, soaring land prices and violent confrontations over land testify to the massive urban transformations underway inIndia today. Having secured an expanded role in urban development from the state, the private sector helps to shape urban restructuring; however, few scholars have studied private real estate development inIndia or revealed the factions that underlie an analytically unitary 'private sector…
Constructing prestige and elaborating the 'professional
This article examines the production of the internationally familiar landscapes of gated high-rise housing, malls and information technology campuses that have been constructed in the National Capital Region, India since the liberalisation of the economy in the early 1990s. It argues that Indian real estate developers have elaborated on one figure of personhood-the upwardly-mobile, high-earning, internationally-oriented 'professional'-as part of …
Introduction
Through a discussion of the articles of this issue, this introduction explores the ways in which the social landscape of post-liberalisation India can be seen through the question of value. We are particularly interested in elucidating how heterogeneous kinds of value-be they economic, ritual, aesthetic, ethical or otherwise-have come to be articulated to and thus constitutive of various forms of cultural practice in contemporary India. We sugges…
Market Stance
This article advances a linguistic anthropological understanding of economic performativity by investigating how people uphold face when it is tied up in business performance. Analyzing interviews with the owners of Indian real estate firms, I demonstrate that under troubled market conditions, market indicators become indexical signs that can threaten a real-estate professional's face, necessitating interactional repositioning vis-à-vis market de…
Constructing prestige and elaborating the 'professional
This article examines the production of the internationally familiar landscapes of gated high-rise housing, malls and information technology campuses that have been constructed in the National Capital Region, India since the liberalisation of the economy in the early 1990s. It argues that Indian real estate developers have elaborated on one figure of personhood-the upwardly-mobile, high-earning, internationally-oriented 'professional'-as part of …
Introduction
Through a discussion of the articles of this issue, this introduction explores the ways in which the social landscape of post-liberalisation India can be seen through the question of value. We are particularly interested in elucidating how heterogeneous kinds of value-be they economic, ritual, aesthetic, ethical or otherwise-have come to be articulated to and thus constitutive of various forms of cultural practice in contemporary India. We sugges…
Conflict and Commensuration
Newly constructed high-rise housing and malls, soaring land prices and violent confrontations over land testify to the massive urban transformations underway inIndia today. Having secured an expanded role in urban development from the state, the private sector helps to shape urban restructuring; however, few scholars have studied private real estate development inIndia or revealed the factions that underlie an analytically unitary 'private sector…
Conclusion
This chapter describes Gurgaon and Indian real estate markets in 2014, six years after the research for the book was completed. Despite ongoing construction, the author did not find the real estate market that many had envisioned in 2006. In part because of the global financial crisis that began in 2008, and in part because of the contradictions inherent in the structure of the chains of intermediaries through which Indian real estate was being f…
Routes of Accumulation
The liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s changed the structure of the real estate industry: it ushered in new roles for private-sector elites and spurred the growth of real estate-related markets such as mortgage financing and media, which precipitated the real estate boom that transformed Gurgaon and other Indian cities. Economic liberalization also opened Indian real estate to foreign direct investment, making foreign investors imp…
Constructing Consumer India
Investors and developers argued that a certain kind of person – one who, unlike the majority of Indians, earns well, lives in a nuclear family, and has a spouse who works – guaranteed future demand for real estate and thus price appreciation. The resulting “end-user” or “genuine resident” eerily resembles a generic globally elite consumer. This chapter traces the origins of this middle class “genuine consumer” from social science surveys to consu…
Quality Projects II
Developers’ Quest for Credibility and Capital
Developers’ value projects coincided with and conflicted with the goal of “transparency.” In response to the demands of foreign financiers and Indian consumers, Indian real estate developers have attempted to transform themselves into world-class, global professionals. Thus transparency is a figure of personhood, a stereotypic “kind” of person that one can perform semiotically. In their profitable new role as intermediaries to global capital, how…
The India Story
Quality Projects I
This chapter follows one international fund’s attempts to profit from the difference between Indian and international fields of real estate practice through building “quality” buildings. Quality here is understood as a semiotic register of building appropriate to an elite foreign audience. However, the fund (EuroFund) faced a profusion of other claims to “quality” and challenges to the value of its employees’ expertise. The chapter uses EuroFund’…
Betting on the Future
This chapter argues that the “India story” is a form of speculative knowledge that enables spectacular accumulation such that industry forecasts guide the production of landscapes designed for particular futures. Rather than use land market signals to decide what to build, as Marxist theory suggests, developers and investors use forms of speculative knowledge to guide their decisions. These industry predictions rely on a logic of comparison that …
Landscapes of Accumulation
The contradictions of mediation
This paper uses a case study of an Indian real estate investment fund to understand the financialization of urban production. It argues that chains of intermediaries transform fixed, illiquid parcels of land into financial assets open to mobile capital. By investigating how such chains are made, it highlights the agency of the actors who build them. Yet, an examination of the fund's failure in the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis demonstrates …
Market Stance
This article advances a linguistic anthropological understanding of economic performativity by investigating how people uphold face when it is tied up in business performance. Analyzing interviews with the owners of Indian real estate firms, I demonstrate that under troubled market conditions, market indicators become indexical signs that can threaten a real-estate professional's face, necessitating interactional repositioning vis-à-vis market de…
Not Just Roads
What happens when infrastructures embody a constant state of incompletion? What happens when they are initiated for political allegiance rather than actual functioning? How do people engage with th
Provincializing the “Real‐Estate Turn”
Business (9 works) · Real estate (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Finance (6 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (6 works) · Economy (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Geography (4 works)