Suchergebnisse

»Postkoloniale Traditionen« verbindet die Ansätze der postkolonialen Theorie und der Subaltern Studies mit einer modernen Ethnografie des ländlichen Südindiens. Dabei wird ein südindisches Dorf als ein Ort der Realisierung einer alternativen nicht-westlichen Moderne beschrieben. Zwei Merkmale der indischen Moderne werden herausgearbeitet: ihre Postkolonialität - das allgegenwärtige Erbe des Kolonialismus - und ihre Traditionalität - ihre Verhandlung in nicht-westlichen Idiomen. Die postkoloniale Moderne wird in dieser Dorfmonografie auf mikro- und infrapolitische Prozesse bezogen und somit einer ethnografischen Repräsentation zugänglich gemacht

This article reflects on the challenge of making 'farmers' suicides' an object of ethnographic enquiry. This challenge is not just a matter of methods, ethics and access but also a matter of categorical choices involved in studying this over-determined and politicised category of self-killing. Drawing on fieldwork in the Wayanad district of Kerala, the article argues that 'farmers' suicides' are not self-evident types of rural death, but become reified and visible through the state's enumerative practices. This state-defined category, conveyed and scandalised by the media, rests on a connection between suicide and—–an equally reified—'agrarian crisis'. The ethnographic endeavour of 'chasing' the elusive object of farmers' suicides may destabilise this seemingly self-evident link. Despite this, farmers' suicides have taken on a political life of their own. They have become a constructed yet real interface for the reworking of the relationship between state and rural citizens in liberalising India. The Indian state has launched unprecedented relief and rehabilitation measures in response to the suicide crisis. This article makes a strong case for grounding the study of farmers' suicides in ethnographies of agrarian practice and the local developmental state.

»Postkoloniale Traditionen« verbindet die Ansätze der postkolonialen Theorie und der Subaltern Studies mit einer modernen Ethnografie des ländlichen Südindiens. Dabei wird ein südindisches Dorf als ein Ort der Realisierung einer alternativen nicht-westlichen Moderne beschrieben. Zwei Merkmale der indischen Moderne werden herausgearbeitet: ihre Postkolonialität - das allgegenwärtige Erbe des Kolonialismus - und ihre Traditionalität - ihre Verhandlung in nicht-westlichen Idiomen. Die postkoloniale Moderne wird in dieser Dorfmonografie auf mikro- und infrapolitische Prozesse bezogen und somit einer ethnografischen Repräsentation zugänglich gemacht.

AbstractThis paper argues that Indian farmers' suicides may fruitfully be described as public deaths. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian district of Wayanad (Kerala), it shows that farmers' suicides become 'public deaths' only via the enumerative and statistical practices of the Indian state and their scandalization in the media. The political nature of suicide as public death thus depends entirely on suicide rates and their production by the state itself. But the power of representations complicates the ethnographic critique of statistical knowledge about suicide. In a context like Wayanad, which had been declared a suicide-prone district by the Indian state, public representations of suicides have taken on a life of their own; statistical categories and the media interpretations of these statistics have had a curious feedback—mediated by development encounters—onto the situated meanings of individual suicides. Local interpretations of individual suicides mostly commented on personal failures of the suicide and on the perils of speculative smallholder agriculture. Ethnography of farmers' suicide based on case studies alone, however, would soon encounter limitations equally grave as the limitations of statistical analysis. Not only is the meaning of suicide (intentions, causes, motives) at the actor level off limits for ethnography, but in addition to that the (public) meaning of suicide is co-determined by state practice including statistical accounting.

The Anthropocene reorients the agrarian question as an ecological question of planetary scale. Rather than resolving the inherent tension between political economy and the biophysical environment by moving political ecology closer to the natural sciences, we propose an active engagement with impulses from the environmental humanities and anthropological engagements with alternative ontologies. The relational political ecology of agriculture that we outline in this article draws on feminist science studies, multispecies ethnography, new materialism and critical geography. We show the relevance of a relational approach to agriculture as a natureculture entanglement by reviewing three conceptualisations of land in political ecology in relation to our anthropological research in South India (Münster) and geographical research in Northern Pakistan (Poerting). Notions of land as resource, land as soil and land as landscape respectively exemplify shifts in theoretical and political engagements with agriculture in the Anthropocene. A relational political ecology of agriculture incorporates these theoretical sensibilities and brings them in conversation with ontological politics of agro-ecological movements who respond to the variegated crises of the anthropocene. We suggest a perspective on agrarian landscape assemblages as coproduced by histories of capitalist transformations and the (affective) relations between humans, other species and materials.

The Anthropocene reorients the agrarian question as an ecological question of planetary scale. Rather than resolving the inherent tension between political economy and the biophysical environment by moving political ecology closer to the natural sciences, we propose an active engagement with impulses from the environmental humanities and anthropological engagements with alternative ontologies. The relational political ecology of agriculture that we outline in this article draws on feminist science studies, multispecies ethnography, new materialism and critical geography. We show the relevance of a relational approach to agriculture as a natureculture entanglement by reviewing three conceptualisations of land in political ecology in relation to our anthropological research in South India (Münster) and geographical research in Northern Pakistan (Poerting). Notions of land as resource, land as soil and land as landscape respectively exemplify shifts in theoretical and political engagements with agriculture in the Anthropocene. A relational political ecology of agriculture incorporates these theoretical sensibilities and brings them in conversation with ontological politics of agro-ecological movements who respond to the variegated crises of the anthropocene. We suggest a perspective on agrarian landscape assemblages as coproduced by histories of capitalist transformations and the (affective) relations between humans, other species and materials.

ABSTRACT This article engages ethnographically with the neoliberalization of nature in the spheres of tourism, conservation and agriculture. Drawing on a case study of Wayanad district, Kerala, the article explores a number of themes. First, it shows how a boom in domestic nature tourism is currently transforming Wayanad into a landscape for tourist consumption. Second, it examines how tourism in Wayanad articulates with projects of neoliberalizing forest and wildlife conservation and with their contestations by subaltern groups. Third, it argues that the contemporary commodification of nature in tourism and conservation is intimately related to earlier processes of commodifying nature in agrarian capitalism. Since independence, forest land has been violently appropriated for intensive cash‐cropping. Capitalist agrarian change has transformed land into a (fictitious) commodity and produced a fragile and contested frontier of agriculture and wildlife. When agrarian capitalism reached its ecological limits and entered a crisis of accumulation, farming became increasingly speculative, exploring new modes of accumulation in out‐of‐state ginger cultivation. In this scenario nature and wildlife tourism emerges as a new prospect for accumulation in a post‐agrarian economy. The neoliberalization of nature in Wayanad, the authors argue, is a process driven less by new modes of regulation than by the agrarian crisis and new modes of speculative farming.