Low-income and socially marginalized people around the world regularly engage in anti-competitive practices. Often illegal and always offensive to those with faith in free markets, these practices rarely help the poor in general. They are, however, often tied to violence against other marginalized people and the obstruction of efficient public services, which can, in many cases, exacerbate the problems of the poor even further. How should we interpret such anti-market behavior? In this dissertation, I address this question through a case study of Delhi’s Balmiki community, a caste that is traditionally associated with sanitation-related work in northern India. Members of this caste, who are frequently referred to as “sweepers” or safai karamcharis, make up the vast majority of Delhi’s sanitation workforce. I show that the social life of this community is deeply permeated by anti-market social practices. Sometimes invisible to the state and sometimes a direct challenge to its authority, these practices help the Balmikis secure a sense of security in an otherwise precarious socio-economic landscape. Most salient among these practices is what I call “proprietary livelihood:” a system in which people effectively own their jobs rather than sell their labor on a market. In the first three chapters of this dissertation, I show how both informal and formal sector sanitation workers own their livelihoods, how their practices are similar to older forms of social organization in India and elsewhere, how their owned livelihoods constitute embedded and transparently social forms of wealth, and also how they use proprietary livelihood to protect themselves from the otherwise prevailing condition of expropriated freedom – a fundamentally modern/capitalist condition in which people’s material sustenance is separated from other aspects of their social lives. In the fourth chapter, I show how the practices of proprietary livelihood are intertwined with the anti-market practices of other members of the Balmiki community, specifically, a leader of organized crime and his political associates. In Chapter 5, I show how the practices of proprietary livelihood come into direct conflict with the bourgeois desires of upper-middle class homeowners to have “neat and clean” neighborhoods. In that same chapter, I also show how homeowner associations act as agents of proletarianization by subjecting the informal sanitation workers to the disciplinary processes of wage labor – processes that simultaneously destroy the transparently social nature of the sanitation workers’ wealth. In the final chapter of this dissertation, I critically engage the language that mainstream economists would use to conceptualize proprietary livelihood and the other forms of transparently social wealth found among Delhi’s Balmiki community. Mainstream economists would categorize these practices as forms of “rent extraction” and “rent seeking,” and they would argue that they introduce inefficiencies into Delhi’s sanitation system. I point out that this view would indeed be consistent with their neo-classical framework, but I go on to argue that the concept of rent itself – in both its classical and neo-classical formulations – is used to designate and domesticate transparently social forms of work and wealth that would otherwise disturb the economists’ worldview in which rational actors seek utility. I pursue this line of inquiry as part of a broader belief that we anthropologists should engage the terms and concepts of neoclassical economists more directly than we have thus far, not because they are correct, but because their dominance in the public sphere reflects the real-world dominance of the commodity form. In the process of making these arguments, I suggest three lines of further inquiry for anthropologists: (1) that we explore the possible existence of proprietary livelihood and similar forms of transparently social wealth in other contexts; (2) that we should pay a little less attention to wages, capital and commodities and consider for a while the role of rent in the everyday lives of people around the world (how they pay it, avoid it, extract it, and seek it); (3) that we should frame our inquiries in light of the condition of expropriated freedom, a condition that now prevails in almost every corner of the world.