Abstract
AbstractThe cultural and historical dimensions of rural lives matter. However, development practitioners and writings tend to play down these aspects. This article demonstrates the significance of oral history in revealing the meanings of women smallholders’ millet-based foodways in southern India. It argues that women farmers’ cultural practices around food constitute fundamental ‘capabilities’ nurtured over a long historical duration, and are essential to any meaningful articulation of ‘development’. Drawing on age-old spiritual beliefs and practices involving non-human entities, the women demonstrate fine-tuned skills in nurturing seeds and growing crops, in preparing and cooking food, and in discerning food tastes, particularly in relation to the local staple ragi, or finger millet. They also express their creativity in the joys of performing songs and farming rituals linked to the agricultural cycle. In this way, cultural capabilities express significant dimensions of women's agency exercised in the intimately related spheres of food and farming. Oral history thus emerges as a research method capable of generating insights into concrete manifestations of culture over a significant historical duration, one that is particularly conducive to reclaiming the voices and life experiences of subaltern groups such as women smallholders who are either not heard or are marginalized in written contemporary and historical documentary records.
Highlights
‘We wish to honour and care for Mother Earth so that she blesses our farm implements and animals, so we prepare a mixture of rice, sesame, and jaggery from a fresh harvest of sugar cane, which we offer to our Mother; and we make an offering of coconut, beetle nut, and fruit to our oxen.’
This article has presented an argument for the significance of oral history in accessing and shedding fresh light on the meanings of women smallholders’ millet-based foodways
The study has highlighted women farmers’ cultural capabilities derived from inhabiting a world in which non-human entities such as deities, soils, seeds, animals, birds, and insects are intimately connected to humans and exercise significant influence over food and farming outcomes
Summary
This article aims to strengthen an emerging advocacy on behalf of the interconnected realms of the cultural and the historical as housing indispensable creativities hitherto not—or not sufficiently—accorded significance in agrarian and development studies It argues that women farmers’ foodways-related cultural and epistemological practices constitute ‘capabilities’ that help them to maintain, adopt, or recover sustainable ways of life which include confronting economic and climatic challenges. These capabilities encompass collective, non-secular knowledges and creativities thereby widening and complicating Amartya Sen’s original concept, defined as what individuals ‘are able to do and to be’ (Sen ; Nussbaum ). This was the case even among the minority of women who affirmed that they managed and controlled the household finances
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