Abstract

Social exclusion is considered critical for understanding poverty, livelihoods, inequality and political participation in rural India. Studies show how exclusion is produced through relations of power associated with gender, caste, religion and ethnicity. Studies also document how people confront their exclusion. We use insights from these studies – alongside science and technology studies – and rely on life history narratives of ‘excluded’ people from rural Tamil Nadu, to develop a new approach to agency as constituted by two contrasting ways of relating: control and care. These ways of relating are at once social and material. They entangle humans with each other and with material worlds of nature and technology, while being mediated by structures such as social norms and cultural values. Relations of control play a central role in constituting exclusionary forms of agency. In contrast, relations of care are central to the agency of resistance against exclusion and of livelihood-building by the ‘excluded’. Relations can be transformed through agency in uncertain ways that are highly sensitive to trans-local contexts. We offer examples of policy-relevant questions that our approach can help to address for apprehending social exclusion in rural India and elsewhere.

Highlights

  • Individual and collective struggles against social exclusion in India are inseparable from longstanding attempts to dismantle caste (Ambedkar 1936)

  • Such struggles have been waged for millennia against casteism that interacts with gender, ethnic and religious exclusions

  • The literature on social exclusion in rural India recognises, to some extent, the agency of ‘excluded’ people to resist and to build livelihoods. These forms of agency are viewed largely as constituted by people’s supportive relations with each other, and not with ecologies and technologies. These nonhumans are neglected in the literature on social exclusion in rural India, and the same is generally true for studies on rural exclusion in other parts of the Global South

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Summary

Introduction

Individual and collective struggles against social exclusion in India are inseparable from longstanding attempts to dismantle caste (Ambedkar 1936). While the agency of ‘excluded’ people is recognised in the literature on social exclusion in India and other parts of the world, studies neglect how this agency is constituted by people’s diverse relations with nature and technologies This neglect means technologies and nature are approached typically in one way: as objects that are amenable to control by social power (Arora et al 2020). We reflect on how our approach can yield insights to help challenge power that constrains the agency of ‘excluded’ people to realise livelihoods and freedom from oppression This can in turn help rethink policies and politics to address these constraints on agency and apprehend social exclusion to achieve sustainable development in rural India and further afield

Social exclusion in rural India: power and agency
Agency of the ‘excluded’
Assembling agency beyond social exclusion
Conceptualising relational agency
Situating agency and uncertainty
Ways of relating
Relational agency of the ‘excluded’
Narrating sociomaterial relations through life histories
Xavier
Madhavi
Concluding reflections
Full Text
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