Agrarian World Research Articles

Conflict between Fulani herders and village landowners in Ghana: capitalism, climate change, and peasant struggles

In discussions of the capitalism–climate change interplay in the agrarian world, the intrusiveness of corporate and state-guided capitalism has been pre-eminent. This ‘hard capital’ focus obscures indirect linkages like how ‘soft capital’, although disoriented from raping nature, unlike the former, exacerbates climate change effects in ways that accelerate the destabilisation of agrarian economies. This indirect connection is evident in agrarian settings in Ghana’s Northern Region, where the resultant peasants’ revolt is directed at neither corporations nor the state but rather local landowning elites (soft capital), who transfer the burden of the twin pressures of climate change and hard capital (state intervention and privatisation of fertiliser supply) to their labourers. Using Marxian social relations of production as a theoretical lens, this paper unpacks how this capitalism–climate change interface plays out in Gushiegu, Northern Ghana. By highlighting that interface and the resultant agrarian struggles, this paper does two things: (1) invites agrarian scholars to transcend the commercialisation of agriculture and carbon capitalism in analysing how the intersection of capitalism and climate change destabilises the agrarian world; (2) encourages scholarship that transcends the more obvious herder–farmer conflicts over land and water in examining the destabilising effects of the aforementioned intersection.

Cotton Monocultures and Reorganizing Socioecological Life in Telangana, India

Five hundred years of desire for cotton has reshaped landscapes, built global economic commodity chains, and devalued human life in the name of producing cheap clothing. Since 2001, cotton monocultures in South India have also reorganized genetic codes, continuing centuries of work to maintain the socioecological possibility of extractive agricultural production. This paper combines ethnographic and ethnobiological research in Telangana, India, to center cotton's role in organizing socioecological life for an agrarian world including farmers, farmworkers, plants, soils, buyers, weeds, and animals. Mutually exclusive systems of genetically modified Bt and organic cotton production offer a range of possible organizations of labor, aspiration, reciprocity, and labor. While historically situated in plantation inequalities, cotton production can also make unexpected room for socioecological relationships outside extractive monoculture.

Empire, Nature and Agrarian World: A History of Rhino Preservation in the Kaziranga Game Reserve, India (1902–1938)

The greater one-horned rhinoceros or Indian rhinoceros ( Rhinoceros unicornis ) faced extinction in British India at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1908, the Government of Assam established the Kaziranga Game Reserve (KGR, now Kaziranga National Park) to preserve the vanishing rhino. As the twentieth century progressed, creating wilderness – by demonising the presence of the peasants and graziers – became a global panacea for protecting wildlife. Contrary to that belief, this article will show how the rhino population revived amidst human existence dictated by agro-ecological interactions and bureaucratic expediencies. The rhino’s ethology and its place in the imagination of rural people minimised its enemies. Moreover, in fluvial geography that constantly transformed the KGR’s boundaries, peasants and graziers creatively negotiated their usufruct rights and supported rhino preservation. Locating the KGR in the historical analysis of fluvial agro-ecology, this study illuminates how a critical interaction between different actors, i.e. human and non-human and coloniser and colonised, accentuated the cultural and material contestations amidst which the rhino eventually survived.

Substituting Coffee and Tea in the Eighteenth Century: A Rural and Material History with Global Implications

AbstractThis article discusses the material history of coffee and tea by drawing on mid-eighteenth-century substitute recipes collected by physicians in different provinces of Sweden, applying perspectives from economic history, the history of science, medicine, and globalization. The starting point for the analysis is that a substitute can be said to reflect what are perceived as the most important properties, in terms of look, feel, taste, and scent, of the thing being copied. The products of a predominantly self-sustained agrarian world, the tea and coffee substitutes offered a distinctive rural alternative to the new exotic beverages. In terms of ecology and economy, this context encompassed large parts of central and north-eastern Europe; it also involved areas with a history of consumption that differed considerably from those of the cosmopolitan elites which have hitherto dominated the scholarship on eighteenth-century coffee and tea. The article finally suggests that the ways in which early modern substitutes were consumed and processed helped pave the way for the mass consumption of imported goods in rural areas of Europe in the following centuries.

La Via Campesina – transforming agrarian and knowledge politics, and co-constructing a field: a laudatio

ABSTRACT La Via Campesina has revalorized agrarian politics, transformed knowledge politics, and co-constructed the field of Critical Agrarian Studies. It has shown the important role of agrarian movements in anti-capitalist struggles and the radical reimagination and construction of a positive future. The significance of LVC is found not in the shrinking numerical size of farming populations or in agriculture’s dwindling macroeconomic contributions to national economies, in relative terms, but in the political heft of what it represents in terms of an alternative future that is so different from the current agrarian world.

Critical agrarian studies and crises of the world-historical present

ABSTRACT This essay examines the global agrarian question as implicated in, and implicating, the current conjuncture of crises by historicizing them – where the past permeates a present, now challenged by a problematic future. I suggest a methodological approach connecting these morbid symptoms to inform a critical agrarian studies, especially insofar as the agrarian world is shaped by, and shapes, global capitalist and environmental relations.

Politically engaged, pluralist and internationalist: critical agrarian studies today

ABSTRACT Critical Agrarian Studies has three actual and aspirational interlocking features which together connect the worlds of academic research and practical politics: it is politically engaged, pluralist and internationalist. These features also defined the older generation of agrarian studies that gave birth to the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) 50 years ago, in 1973. 1 Within a decade or so of the journal's inauguration, the agrarian world had been transformed radically amid neoliberal globalization. An altered world did not render agrarian studies less relevant; on the contrary, it has become even more so, but within a different context in which political engagement, pluralism and internationalism develop new meanings and manifest in new ways.

Unequal coexistence in the North eastern Cerrado

The municipality of Correntina (Bahia State, Brazil) was long populated by family farmers raising crops in the valleys and transhumant cattle on the plateaus. Since the 1970s, entrepreneurial agriculture has gradually taken over these plateaus. This article aims to study, from a coexistence-based perspective, the links between these two agrarian worlds (opportunity for wage labor, competition for land and irrigation water) which strongly influence agriculture in the valleys. Despite equivalent economic productivity per hectare, due to capital intensification for some and labor intensification for others, a gap in terms of agricultural income now separates the farms on the plateau from those in the valleys.

Empire, Nature and Agrarian World: A History of Rhino Preservation in the Kaziranga Game Reserve, India (1902–1938)

The greater one-horned rhinoceros or Indian rhinoceros ( Rhinoceros unicornis ) faced extinction in British India at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1908, the Government of Assam established the Kaziranga Game Reserve (KGR, now Kaziranga National Park) to preserve the vanishing rhino. As the twentieth century progressed, creating wilderness – by demonising the presence of the peasants and graziers – became a global panacea for protecting wildlife. Contrary to that belief, this article will show how the rhino population revived amidst human existence dictated by agro-ecological interactions and bureaucratic expediencies. The rhino’s ethology and its place in the imagination of rural people minimised its enemies. Moreover, in fluvial geography that constantly transformed the KGR’s boundaries, peasants and graziers creatively negotiated their usufruct rights and supported rhino preservation. Locating the KGR in the historical analysis of fluvial agro-ecology, this study illuminates how a critical interaction between different actors, i.e. human and non-human and coloniser and colonised, accentuated the cultural and material contestations amidst which the rhino eventually survived.

Anticipatory ruination

ABSTRACT Anticipatory ruination is a mode of prefigurative governance in anticipation of the real and perceived threats of climate change. The concept draws our attention to the ways in which climate crisis is not inevitable, but is produced historically and through contemporary relations of power. In this brief piece, I examine the concept in relation to recent trends in critical agrarian studies that examine how narratives about climate crisis shape contemporary responses and their impacts in ways that entrench and reconfigure inequalities in the agrarian world. I conclude with a discussion of visions for agrarian climate justice as alternatives to the telos of anticipatory ruination.

Pemberdayaan Masyarakat berbasis Ekowisata (Studi Kasus Alih Fungsi Lahan Bengkok Menjadi Ekowisata “Taman Stambran” di Desa Tambangan Kec. Mijen Kota Semarang)

The orientation of the village community began to change from agrarian to industrial. resulting in decreased interest in the agrarian world - both agriculture and plantations - in rural communities, especially in areas close to the city, one of which is the village of Tambangan in Semarang. Therefore, changes in orientation also appear in crooked land management. Then the idea began to emerge to convert the crooked land into a more productive ecotourism area. This article uses a qualitative descriptive research method, and this article tries to explore community empowerment through ecotourism in Tambangan village. The results of this study indicate that the conversion of crooked land in RW 1 Tambangan can run smoothly without any internal conflicts. The presence of ecotourism in the region actually generates new ideas that have positive potential both socially and economically. The ecotourism concept applied by residents of RW 1 Tambangan is manifested in an integrative pattern between playing and learning in nature with the name “Taman Stambran” ecotourism. In addition, the positive impact on the economic sector is very meaningful for small traders who are native to the region. This positive result in the economic sector can be seen from the start of the establishment of small shops around tourist objects, without having to take up space for the conversion of crooked land that has been used to build and develop Stambran Park ecotourism. This is certainly very encouraging in the midst of the growing number of retailers.

Possibilities for Multispecies Approaches in Coffee Landscapes

Multispecies approaches can increase our knowledge around the social and ecological dimensions of coffee landscapes. Ethnobiologists combine the social and natural sciences to study the relationships between humans, the environment, and biota. Multispecies approaches can build from these strategies to further explore the social and biological elements that humans together with more-than-humans contribute to ecological landscapes. Using co-constitutions as a key concept, I highlight multispecies studies into agrarian worlds, review ethnobiological studies around coffee, and suggest potential research areas.

Weedy Finance: Weather Insurance and Parametric Life on Unstable Grounds

Based in the agrarian worlds of commercial sesame farming in northern Paraguay, where insurance companies are now selling weather derivatives to poor farmers, this article tracks financial practices that depend less on the healthy crops and more on the weeds that thrive among the profitable plants. Parametric insurance operates like a derivative and is triggered by certain weather conditions, which raises questions about the limits of survivability for human-crop relations. I sketch out a series of concerns about weeds as an entry point and helpful heuristic for multiple overlapping kinds of speculation in a multispecies, capitalist, and troubled landscape. By gridding the world to a limited set of expedient parameters, what generative social and human grounds do we lose in the process? A speculative anthropological imaginary might posit “weedy finance” as a critical standpoint and set of political claims for casting climate-based finance as one of the lively systems that can and should be intentionally and selectively weeded out.

Vulnerability of groundwater from elevated nitrate pollution across India: Insights from spatio-temporal patterns using large-scale monitoring data

Agriculture-sourced, non-point groundwater contamination (e.g., nitrate) is a serious concern from the drinking water crisis aspect across the agrarian world. India is one of the largest consumers of nitrogen fertilizers in South-Asia as well as in the world but groundwater nitrate lacks critical attention as a wide-scale drinking water pollutant in the country. Our study provides the first documentation of the distribution of groundwater nitrate and the extent of elevated nitrate contamination across India, along with the delineation of the temporal trends and the natural and anthropogenic factors that influence such occurrence of groundwater nitrate. High resolution, annual-scale spatio-temporal variability of groundwater nitrate concentration and consequent contamination was delineated using groundwater nitrate measurements from ~3 million drinking water wells spread across 7038 administrative blocks between 2010 and 2017 in India. An average 8% of the studied blocks were found affected by elevated groundwater nitrate (> 45 mg/L). Depth-dependent trend demonstrated that nitrate concentrations were about 14% higher in shallow water wells (≤ 35 m) than deep wells (>35 m). The overall temporal trend of groundwater nitrate concentration was decreasing slightly nationwide in the study period. The correlation tests and causality test results indicated that the spatial distribution of groundwater nitrate was significantly associated with agricultural N-fertilizer usage, whereas the decreasing temporal trend corresponded with the overall reduced N-fertilizer usage during the study period. Spatial autocorrelation analysis identified the clustering of high nitrate areas in central, north, and southern India, specifically in areas with higher fertilizer usage. We estimate about 71 million Indians possibly exposed to elevated groundwater nitrate concentrations and the majority of them reside in rural areas. Thus, this study provides the previously unrecognized, wide-scale, anthropogenic, diffused groundwater nitrate contamination across India.

The land is mine

The parables told by Jesus the Galilean, when read from a realistic perspective, can be seen as a window to the exploitative socio-economic, political and religious situation of the peasantry in first-century Roman Palestine. The Galilean’s parables picture this exploitative world, and also speak of ways to address the societal ills of his day. In an agrarian world, land meant life. For most of the peasantry, however, this was not the case anymore. In reaction to this situation, Jesus proclaimed the possibility of a world in which the land, especially its produce, belongs to everyone. This world he called the kingdom of God, a different kind of world, a world ruled by God’s generosity and goodness. In this world, everybody has enough.

La reforma agraria: la paz con las FARC, un compromiso aplazado de nuevo

El acuerdo de paz entre el gobierno colombiano y las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) dejó de nuevo aplazada, por tercera vez en ochenta años (1936, 1960-1968, 2016), la reforma agraria. En el acuerdo del 2016, las partes acordaron un lacónico proceso de formalización de la propiedad privada mediante la asignación de títulos para quienes ya tienen posesión sobre la tierra. También se aceptó restituir y reparar a quienes perdieron la tierra en la guerra de 25 años y se volvió a dejar para después la redistribución de la propiedad. Este asunto es de especial importancia, pues el coeficiente Gini de tierras en Colombia llega al 0,8 %, uno de los más desiguales del mundo. Teniendo en cuenta lo anterior, en este artículo se revisa cómo el tema agrario en Colombia continúa siendo un proceso de acumulación originaria permanente —con el latifundio como su forma dominante—, y se sostiene que la paz acordada es solo una manera de preparar el mundo agrario colombiano para el gran capitalismo, creando derechos de propiedad necesarios en la agroindustria y haciendo de los campesinos una fuerza de trabajo disponible para la producción, ahora que estos han quedado liberados de la guerra.

Messick Brinkley. — Sharīʿa Scripts: A Historical Anthropology

Brinkley Messick’s long-awaited book is the fruit of several decades of reflection on the practice of Islamic law, following his 1993 classic The Calligraphic State. It is set in the author’s research terrain of predilection: Yemen’s central highlands in and around the city of Ibb. This predominantly agrarian world is rather distinct, as it never experienced colonial rule directly, neither under the Ottomans nor at the hands of subsequent foreign powers. Another exceptionalism is the nature o...

De la clase social a la estructura de unidades domésticas en el agro. El continuo campesino-proletario y una propuesta para su análisis

El artículo se inserta en la problemática de las transformaciones del mundo agrario latinoamericano y de la diferenciación de las clases sociales del agro, reeditando discusiones acerca del complejo campesino-proletario, en el contexto de las actuales economías agroexportadoras. El objetivo del artículo es plantear una propuesta teórico-metodológica para estudiar la estructura de unidades domésticas agropecuarias, a partir de una operacionalización de esta noción en relación al concepto clase. Se concluye con el planteamiento de una tipología de UDs, que permite caracterizar las estructuras de reproducción de la fuerza de trabajo a partir de las fuentes de origen de sus ingresos. 

The Hidden Life of Monuments: Reflections from the Lost Stories Project

The Hidden Life of Monuments: Reflections from the Lost Stories Project Ronald Rudin (bio) SINCE 2012 I HAVE BEEN WORKING WITH historians, educators, artists, and filmmakers to develop the Lost Stories Project, which seeks from the public little-known stories from the Canadian past, gives these stories to artists who transform them into inexpensive pieces of public art on appropriate sites, and documents the artists’ creative process through the production of short films.1 When I came up with the concept for the project it was largely in the context of my own research over the past 15 years, which had explored the public representation of the past in both Quebec and Atlantic Canada with a particular emphasis upon the backstory that is usually impossible for the casual observer to perceive. In the case of Quebec, I examined the public memory of Samuel de Champlain and Mgr. François de Laval, generally viewed as the founding fathers of French-speaking Quebec: one the secular father (responsible for the settlement at Quebec City) and the other the religious founder (the first Roman Catholic bishop of Quebec).2 In regards to Atlantic Canada, I focused my attention on efforts in the early 21st century to commemorate both the founding moment for Acadians – the attempt to establish a permanent settlement on Île Ste-Croix in 1604 (so four years before Quebec City) – and their moment of trauma – the deportation of the Acadians between 1755 and 1763, or what they call “le grand dérangement.”3 I learned from these projects what others have also observed: namely, that public remembrance of the past – through such tools as the construction of [End Page 111] monuments – is really as much – maybe more – about the people who had the power to erect them than they were about the individuals being honoured. This point was convincingly made by Kirk Savage in his Monument Wars, which explores the commemorative landscape on the National Mall in Washington. Savage paid particular attention to the Washington Monument, the huge obelisk completed in the 1880s that bears no iconography that would directly link it to the first president of the United States. From Savage’s perspective, however, there was nothing odd about this situation because “this was indeed a ‘modern monument’ that had nothing to do with George Washington and his agrarian world. It was a monument to technocratic wisdom and bureaucratic efficiency, seemingly accessible to a democratic people yet remote from their experience and understanding.”4 But while there is a large scholarly literature that tries to tease out why and how some individuals are commemorated in public space (and others are not), sometimes this is simply not possible due to a lack of sources. In my own research, for instance, I was unable to find the minutes of the committee responsible for creating Quebec City’s monument in honour of Champlain, which was unveiled in 1898 only metres from the Château Frontenac. One report indicated that those minutes had been sealed inside the monument’s pedestal.5 More broadly, Savage has pointed to the challenges of such research since the archives provide only “a scattered record. Sometimes monument committees are very proud of themselves, and they publish their proceedings and then there are more records and archives. Other times they’re just lost entirely.”6 In this context, I imagined that Lost Stories could provide a solution since I would be able to watch the entire process unfold. What I could not have imagined in 2012, however, was that monuments were about to take centre stage in heated public debates across the globe, mostly prompted by demands for the removal of structures connected with now-disgraced individuals or deeds. By and large, these debates have only reinforced my sense of the pertinence of Lost Stories. As we will see in the following section of this short essay, the controversies surrounding such monuments as those dedicated to Confederate heroes in the American South have dealt only superficially with these structures and have largely ignored the context in which they were erected in the first place. Then, in the subsequent sections, I [End Page 112] will return to Lost Stories to discuss...

Interspecies Relations and Agrarian Worlds

Recent years have witnessed burgeoning interest in interspecies relations and multispecies ethnography. This review explores what such perspectives bring to long-standing anthropological attention to agrarian worlds. Considering why so much recent scholarship only minimally engages with longer disciplinary traditions found within ecological and environmental anthropology and ethnobotany, the review examines continuities and discontinuities across these different modes of attending to interspecies relationships. From here, it explores how contemporary scholarship renews anthropological attention to questions of domestication, relatedness, agency, and personhood and how it charts new ground by engaging theories of biopolitics, biocapital, biosemiotics, and plant ontologies. While noting that recent work has distinctive theoretical preoccupations, the review concludes by suggesting that fruitful possibilities lie in working with, and across, established and emergent anthropologies of the agrarian.