This paper explicates the enduring and permanent structures that empower market organisers to act as they shape the temporary markets of the Durga Puja festival in India. Market organisers invoke, create and assemble market devices that empower market actors to perform these temporary markets. Using a visual sociology methodology we show how organisers calculate and intervene to empower certain market actors - specifically, ‘those at the BoP’, as well as to disempower certain forms of action - the use of toxic substances in the production of the Durga icon. We show how sometimes market empowerment and disempowerment are sustained beyond the performance of the temporary market, transforming the community and environmental practices. In this way, the paper foregrounds the two-way relationship between broader social structures and the performance of temporary markets by showing how market practices sometimes spread out beyond the market and become part of the broader structures of everyday life
