Fertile Ground

Abstract

Soil has long been at the center of debates about environmental degradation in the Himalaya. This chapter shows how concern about the care of soil entwines understandings of human and nonhuman agency with practices of state-making in the region. Moving between colonial efforts to assess the fertility of land, and contemporary interventions that encourage farmers to construct compost pits, this chapter demonstrates that the ways in which agrarian practices of working with soil, manure, and compost are recognized by state institutions powerfully inform development interventions. Introducing the concept of agrarian agency, the chapter parses this notion, dwelling on distinctions drawn by state officials between being “organic by default” and becoming “organic by design.” It argues that in the twenty-first century, the particular ways in which agrarian agency gets parsed prove to be consequential both for who can become organic, and for what organic itself comes to mean. Ultimately, this chapter shows that what comes to count as human agency, and what does not, is itself a mode through which state power works.